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Basic Troubleshooting Tips

When asking for help on AllStarLink Community or in a GitHub Issue here are some tips on how to ask for help and how to get common troubleshooting information that is often needed to understand your specific issues.

Tips on Asking for Help

Keep in mind that when asking for help, the pool of people likely able to help have no understanding of your personal setup, situation, skills, etc. In order to get good help, you need to ask a good question. Make sure when asking for help that you hit the following points:

Explain Precisely What is not Working Properly

Requests for help such as "ASL doesn't work" or "my Pi crashes" or "I can't do X" without any further details or information is unable to be diagnosed and assisted.

Examples of GOOD ways to ask a question:

  • I just built a new ASL3 Pi and when I try to connect to the interface I get this particular error.

  • After I configured my node, I am trying to do this particular thing and it doesn't work because of this particular error.

  • I am trying to configure this particular feature in rpt.conf and when I do, this particular thing happens.

  • I used to be able to do this thing and after I change this other thing then this thing stopped working.

Basically, before submitting your question to Community, make sure your post contains the basics of "what am I trying to do", "what do I think should be happening", and "what is happening instead". If you are filing an issue on GitHub, use the Issue Templates - they ask for information for a reason.

Be Ready to Provide Requested Basic Troubleshooting Info

If you are going to ask for help, be ready and willing to provide the basic troubleshooting information that is requested. For example, if you're having a problem linking to another node, be ready to provide - or even better provide in advance - the basic troubleshooting information needed to help with your problem.

Items that may be requested include elements such as:

  • How is your node connected to the Internet?

  • What IAX2 port is configured?

  • What client are you using?

  • What radio type are you using?

  • What is your IP address?

  • Is the time correct on your system?

  • Can you put a monitor on the device and tell what the screen says

  • What did the log say about...?

Core AllStarLink does not support certain other projects/tools such as HamVOIP, Supermon/Supermon2, SkyWarnPlus, or AllScan. Some of the developers of these tools such as SkyWarnPlus and AllScan are active and answer questions on the Community, and others are not.

If you are told, "that isn't supported but have you tried doing it in this supported way", consider giving it a try.

The release of AllStarLink v3 uses modern Asterisk 20 LTS. Legacy installs use Asterisk 1.4 which was end of life in 2012. Thus, there are literally 14+ years of changes of how Asterisk operates that app_rpt (the main engine behind ASL) had to conform to. Notably, the configuration syntax which changed gradually over time for users staying current with Asterisk, is an "all of a sudden" change in ASL3. One cannot paste old configurations into modern ASL3 and expect it to "just work".

Additionally, Asterisk no longer runs as the root user on Linux which means that its ability to do things to the system such as make OS changes is purposefully restricted. ASL3 and Asterisk are very security conscious as many of our users run ASL3 systems on the open Internet.

Give Questioners the Benefit of the Doubt

In general, if people are asking questions about the details of your problem, they are likely trying to help and not nitpick. In general, if many people are having the problem, it is already known and likely documented.

If it's not, then likely your issue is unique to your setup and providing the requested troubleshooting is needed to help you further.

Basic Troubleshooting

Gathering Logs

If you are asked to provide logs, there are two standard ways to provide logs, using Cockpit or using the journalctl tool from the Linux CLI.

Gathering Logs with Cockpit

In the Cockpit interface, click Services on the left navbar. The service list will display. Wait for the full list to load and then click on the blue link name of the service. The common services are:

  • allmon3 - Allmon3

  • asl3-update-astdb - Maintenance of the astdb.txt file used by third-party apps

  • asl3-update-nodelist - Maintenance of the "file" based lookup database, if installed

  • asterisk - Core Asterisk/app_rpt

  • networking - Information about network interfaces

  • NetworkManager - Information about network items of all sorts

  • systemd-timesyncd - Information about network time synchronization

After clicking on one of the links, wait until Service logs fills in and then view the logs. Clicking View all logs will show more logs.

Gathering Logs with CLI/SSH

Use the journalctl -xeu command to provide logging output. For example:

journalctl -xeu asterisk.service

Common services are:

  • allmon3.service - Allmon3

  • asl3-update-astdb.service - Maintenance of the astdb.txt file used by third-party apps

  • asl3-update-nodelist.service - Maintenance of the "file" based lookup database, if installed

  • asterisk.service - Core Asterisk/app_rpt

  • networking.service - Information about network interfaces

  • NetworkManager.service - Information about network items of all sorts

  • systemd-timesyncd.service - Information about network time synchronization

Gathering Configs

It is often needed to gather certain configuration details. Use the Cockpit Console or the SSH/CLI interface. People asking for information will likely provide the filename needed in their request. However, here are some easy ways to get the data requested:

  • tail -n50 FILE - Print the last 50 lines of FILE

  • tail -F FILE - Print the output of FILE as it is written to (useful for watching logs live). Press Ctrl+c to exit

  • more FILE - Print FILE by pages

  • less FILE - Less is more than more... Less is an interactive scroller and searching interface. For example typing /SOMETHING will search for the string "SOMETHING" forward from where you are in the file and ?SOMETHING will search backwards. Enter CTRL+c to exit

  • grep SOMETHING FILE - This is for basic searching within a file. For example, you can use grep to answer the question "what does the line with FOO in FILE say?". This command would be grep FOO FILE. Note that by default, your grep searches are case-sensitive, use the -i flag for case-insensitive searches, i.e. grep -i FOO FILE will find all instances of "foo", "FOO", "FoO", etc.

When possible, please copy/paste log and search text instead of attaching screenshots into systems for troubleshooting. Text is far easier to deal with (can be quoted in replies), and will make your trouble show up in search engines to help "the next person".