Custom Node Announcements
AllStar supports custom node announcements or node names. These will be played in place of the node number.
The distribution of these is optional and each node will use rsync to download new ones about 2-3 times per day. This is done via the rc.updatenodelist script in ASL 1.01 and before, or NodeNameUpdate.sh via cron in newer releases. It requires rsync to be installed.
Important changes
As of June 4, 2019 rsync://allstarlink.org no longer works. This has moved to rsync.allstarlink.org.
It is suggested you change the rc.updatenodelist file to use rsync.allstarlink.org.
The following sed command can make the change automatically for you.
sed -i 's/rsync:\/\/allstarlink.org\/connect-messages/rsync:\/\/rsync.allstarlink.org\/connect-messages/g' /usr/local/bin/rc.updatenodelist
Be sure you reboot or kill the rc.updatenodelist process to have it respawn from init.
Making custom announcements
Steve Rodgers has a PDF document on producing a file in the format required for any custom announcement in AllStar.
Audacity can be used to convert almost any sound file into the proper format.
If you intend to make the announcement avialble network wide, please see the requirements for node names below
Adding new announcements
AllStar requires the following for node announcements:
- ulaw 8 bit wave
- under 10 seconds
- under 100k in size
The file should be named $nodeNumber.ulaw and placed in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/rpt/nodenames
This will add it to that local node. Should you want it to be used across all nodes, see the next section.
Network Announcements
To enable the node announcements to propagate to the rest of the nodes, AllStarLink can add them to the main repository. Eventually this will be in the web portal, but for now must be done via a email.
The following applies to network announcements:
A networks announcement may consist of a reading of the node number, callsign, location or other short identification of the node. This should be inoffensive benign language; suitable for any audience. The ASL admin team will remove and ban users caught abusing this service.
Once you have the announcement working locally, please email it to helpdesk@allstarlink.org.
Our admin team will test it and then add it to the repository. Nodes will begin updating it, but it can take up to 24 hours for some nodes to update.