[Dxspider-support] Node_default spot filtering

[Martin Davies G0HDB]

Hello all, although I've been a subscriber to the dxcluster.org mailing list since it first started 
in Aug 2004 I've only very rarely ventured or felt a need to post anything to the list but I'd now 
like to call on the collective wisdom of the community for some help with filtering on a 
DXSpider node.

I've been the sysop of the GB7DXC node for about 15yrs; although the node is still happily 
and reliably running the original AK1A PacketCluster(tm) software under DOS 6.22 on an 
ancient PC I've decided that, despite me being pretty much a complete Linux ignoramus, it's 
time to try moving into the 21st century and to give DXSpider ago.  To this end I've just 
followed the excellent detailed instructions (V1.12) produced by Bill N6WS and have installed 
DXSpider 1.55 onto a Raspberry Pi Model B+ with Debian Wheezy 2015-05-15 on an 8GByte 
SD card; the Pi is 'headless' so I have to do everything via SSH sessions (using puTTY from 
the various Win7 PCs on my home network). 

I've configured the DXSpider installation on the Pi as GB7DXC-5 and as far as I can tell 
everything seems to be correctly installed and running.  I've got GB7DXC-5 linking usually to 
GB7BAA, but also occasionally to GB7MBC or GB7DJK, and everything seems to work pretty 
much as expected...

For the time being I'm treating GB7DXC-5 as an 'experimental' node for my own test and 
evaluation purposes so I'm not encouraging users to use it for 'operational' access to the 
DXCluster - I want to spend more time getting used to DXSpider before letting users loose on 
the node.

One of the things I've been trying on GB7DXC-5 is node_default filtering so that I can control 
which spots (and other stuff) get accepted and rejected by the node.  To this end I've tried 
setting the following node_default spot filter:

	reject/spot node_default on hf and not by_zone 14,15

I had expected that this would prevent any spots originated by stations outside zones 14 and 
15 from getting into 'DXC-5 but this doesn't seem to be the case - from the sysop console I 
can see that even with the filter appearing to be active there are numerous HF spots from 
stations in especially W, JA and VK coming through the node.

I've also tried an accept/spot node_default filter instead of the reject filter but this doesn't 
seem to work either - I still see lots of spots originated by stations outside zones 14 and 15.

I've read all the documentation about node_default (and other) filtering and can't see what I 
might be doing wrong, so I'll be grateful for any guidance anyone can give on how to set a 
node_default spot filter that actually does what I want!

Thanks in advance,

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Martin, G0HDB


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