Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Outages due to upgrades during early December

The aprs.fi service might have some small service breaks during the following few days. I'm upgrading the master server with 4*1TB disks (RAID10, 2TB usable capacity) and doing some other upgrades while I'm at it (including but not limited to the new operating system kernel, switching filesystems, LVM, database engine upgrade, etc). The first two disks already went in tonight and replaced half of the old ones, and the process will continue with data migration from the old disks to the new ones.

The first reboot (due to kernel upgrade) will be on Wednesday morning (around 0600 UTC probably). The web service should keep on running happily, but if the reboot will only take a short while, I probably won't bother to move the APRS data collection master function to the second server during the reboot, and some data will be lost during the boot.

Sorry for the trouble!

Monday, November 1, 2010

Clickable track lines, center & zoom links, etc

I've just installed a few small improvements on aprs.fi.

The track lines are now clickable, allowing for easier track line identification and jumping to the current position of that station.

The info balloons of stations (and the track lines) now have "center" and "zoom" links. There's also a new separator line in the info balloon, indicating the track line color used by that station.

The track waypoint hover-on callsign labels now also show the symbol of the station.

The track line drawing code received a nice little bug fix: the station symbol image is only really drawn at the last position within the selected time range. The symbol image will no longer jump and run away when you scroll the map along a track line towards the current position of the station.