[Dxspider-support] G6NHU-2 has moved!

Wed Apr 16 12:31:39 BST 2025

If anyone would like a free VM, myself and a few ham friends are setting up a charity to help hams, we’re already offering free VMs for ham related projects - drop me an email if you're interested.

73,
Chris - G1FEF

> On 16 Apr 2025, at 11:10, Terry Hunt via Dxspider-support <dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Keith,
> As you know because we were partners I recently did something similar with K4HNT-2.  I was running it at home on an old laptop using Debian 12.  I live out away from the city so no fiber solution was available for me, my internet was standard cable connection and probably the worst thing was I have no power
> I found a coupon for ColoCrossing and was able to get a 1gig 1 processor 25GB disk and 2 TB bandwidth virtual host running Debian 12 for $10 a year.  So far it has been very stable, there was an outage day before yesterday for about an hour but we had a regional internet disruption which took us down at work as well.
> 
> I followed many of the same steps you did and also saw only a few minutes of downtime during the cut over.  I took the opportunity to also move to passwords with  my node partners and implemented MRTG sso my statistics are published at https://qsl.net/k/k4hnt/DXSpider/Stats/stats.html.  I also took some time to clean up cron and implement a few if Kin’s scripts.
> 
> I recently learned of wireguard and tail snail and am in the process of implementing that into all my devices.  Once complete, I will be able to remove the exposure of SSH to the internet and just use it via the VPN tunnel.
> 
> Anyone interested in ColoCrossing specials, they can be found at https://cloud.colocrossing.com/index.php?rp=/store/specials
> 
> Congrats on the successful cutover!
> 
> Terry, K4HNT
> 
> 
> 
>> On Apr 16, 2025, at 5:29 AM, Keith, G6NHU via Dxspider-support <dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> Warning - Long post ahead!
>> 
>> In the lead up to doing this, I've reduced my number of node partners by over 50%. I've never said no to a partner request and that meant I just had far too many partners. 
>> 
>> After a couple of weeks of trying different things and working out what's the best solution for me, on Monday evening I moved my node from a Raspberry Pi5 at home to a Digital Ocean Droplet.
>> 
>> I should start by saying that there's nothing wrong with a cluster node running on a Pi5, it works really well, especially when using an external SSD instead of an SD card. Before the Pi5 was released, mine ran on a Pi4 and that was good as well.
>> 
>> I first picked the lowest spec Digital Ocean Droplet that gave me 1Gb memory at $7 but after some testing, I discovered that it bogged down a bit doing historical sh/dx searches as I have my search history set to one year. I tried with two cores and that was significantly better. I was given a referral link which gave me $200 credit that lasts for two months so I was able to try lots of different configurations at zero cost. If you want to have a play, please use my referral link which will get you the same $200 credit: https://m.do.co/c/d94f86a3201c
>> 
>> At the weekend I changed the TTL on my my main access url to 60 seconds so that when I came to do the final migration, it would be with minimal downtime for my users.
>> 
>> The actual process was really straightforward. I picked Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as the operating system for the droplet and used SV4FRI's install script to install dxspider, I tested that for a couple of days and then cloned my existing /spider directory from the Pi to the droplet, changed the callsign to -5 and again, ran that for a few days.
>> 
>> I was happy with that so on Monday evening, this was my process:
>> 
>> I stopped the spider service and renamed the /spider directory on the Droplet that I'd been testing.
>> 
>> I stopped the spider service on my Pi5 and started a new copy of the /spider directory over to the Droplet.
>> 
>> While this was copying, I updated the A record on dxspider.co.uk <http://dxspider.co.uk/> and for any historic users, I updated the A record on g6nhu.changeip.net <http://g6nhu.changeip.net/> and g6nhu.getmyip.com <http://g6nhu.getmyip.com/> as well.
>> 
>> With the copy complete, I checked all the permissions on the Droplet /spider directory, enabled and started the spider service and rebooted the Droplet.
>> 
>> Within a couple of seconds, I had almost all my users back on again and then I remembered something. When I originally set up my node, it was using port 7373. When I built my first spider,  I port forwarded 7300 and 7373 in my router to 7300 on the node so I quickly added port 7373 in the Droplet firewall,  added another listener in /spider/local/Listeners.pm and restarted the node.
>> 
>> And that was it. Total downtime was about five minutes and because I'd set TTL nice and low, everyone was straight back in.
>> 
>> The VPS I finally went with was a Basic Droplet with Premium AMD CPU, 2 GiB RAM and 2 vCPUs. It comes with 60 GiB storage and a total transfer bandwidth of 3 TB per month. This is far more storage and transfer I'll ever need but it's what came with the two cores I wanted. You can see from the attached screenshot how much bandwidth it's actually using, this was yesterday evening so it'll be a bit higher at weekends but still nowhere near the limit. The cost for this Droplet is $21/month plus tax so it works out as under £20/month. As I said above, if anyone wants to try this, please use my link for $200 credit: https://m.do.co/c/d94f86a3201c
>> 
>> My home internet is fibre to the premises (FTTP) running at 900 Mbps down and 110 Mbps up so the node barely used any traffic but the number of users I had clearly added some congestion to my network as I've noticed since moving it that the internet feels a lot faster. Previously, when going to web pages, there would be a couple of seconds delay between hitting enter and the page loading, as though it was slow doing a DNS lookup. That delay has now gone and everything is a lot snappier than it was before.
>> 
>> This post is just for info really, to describe the process I went through and to give information to anyone who might be considering something similar.
>> 
>> 73 Keith.
>> 
>> 
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