[Dxspider-support] Help & Questions

[Dirk Koopman]

On 18/02/17 16:20, Ed via Dxspider-support wrote:
> I'm using a Pi3B for the node. I've looked through the archives for the
> past 2 years with no luck finding any reference to what  I need some
> help with.
>
> 1 . According to top cluster.pl is being run by root. This does not
> seem right to me. I used the restart/respawn script to start the
> cluster. What did I do wrong here ?

It should not be running as root. The installation manual makes this 
very clear. I believe I have mentioned it again quite recently. Please 
would you email your start script to me privately and I will look at it 
(as there are at least four ways to do this now. Sigh...).

When we have fixed the script you will need to do some judicious 
chowning before restarting the software.

> 2. Again top is showing the cluster is the only thing running but my
> memory keeps decreasing. I'm down to 175 meg from just under a gig.

But is it being consumed by the cluster.pl program or in "buffers"?

top - 17:34:38 up 11 days, 10:41,  3 users,  load average: 0.10, 0.03, 0.01
Tasks: 210 total,   1 running, 209 sleeping,   0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.3 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  
0.0 st
KiB Mem :  8161292 total,   732556 free,   602008 used, 6826728 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  1000444 total,  1000444 free,        0 used. 7112816 avail Mem

   PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ 
COMMAND
  1196 djk       20   0  169964  90740   9260 S   2.0  1.1 186:14.94 perl

I have considerably more users and node connected than you and I am only 
using about 170KB max. But you will see most of the rest of the memory 
use for "buffers". In my case 6826728KB. I am also running several other 
things as well. The crucial thing to worry about is figure being used 
for Swap. In my case I am using none. But a few KB will probably not hurt.
> 3. I have 2 partners and right now I'm showing 413 nodes and 6517
> users, is that excessive ? I know it's a contest weekend, but.

No, That's completely normal. It's just showing the size of the complete 
cluster using AK1A/CCluster/DXSpider software. Unfortunately it probably 
doesn't include ARCluster nodes and users unless they are directly 
connected to a node using the other software.

> 4. What if any routine maintainence needs to be done.

No, not really. The node does it all itself - provided that you don't 
mess with the system crontab that comes with the installation and you 
periodically update. This will usually get you a (more) up to date 
version of the prefix file and any fixes that have become apparent. If 
the USDB interests you then you need to download that periodically and 
have a local crontab  instruction that imports it.

Otherwise it just runs for years at a time. I believe the current record 
is something like (more than) four years. However I don't recommend this 
as there are likely to be updates that appear from time to time that 
will require a restart. NOTE: this does not (usually) include any 
commands that might have been updated (or added) or things like new 
prefixes or usdb entries. The commands are picked up automatically at 
run time and the prefixes / usdb data can be imported with the 
'load/prefixes' and 'load/usdb' commands.

Dirk G1TLH