Going quiet
From time to time APRS OTA needs maintenance for operating system patches, upgrades, or other work that can not be done while the service is running.
We can deploy new releases of the website and the bot while everything is running. In fact, you probably have never noticed these deployments, which is great because they can sometimes happen multiple times per day.
Someday we’ll be able to do all those things without the service going down, but until then, we will need periodic scheduled downtime.
In preparation for these maintenance events, the service goes quiet.
Going quiet means that no new ops can start, but everything else will continue to work.
When the service is going quiet, a banner with the same explanation will appear on the website. Because the reason for going quiet needs to fit in an APRS message, there isn’t much room for detailed explanations. I’ll usually post more detailed explanations in the discord server if you want more information.
Everything already on the air keeps working
While the service is going quiet, everything on the air continues to work:
- Chasers can still CHASE you, and their position reports still reach you.
- You can still QSL them, and those contacts are still logged, scored, and shown on the website.
- BLAST still reaches everyone on your op.
- STAY still adds 30 minutes, as many times as the two hour cap allows.
- TIME still tells you how long you have.
- DONE still ends your op and still sends your summary.
CQ, INFO, HELP and PING all answer normally, so you can still find an op and still test your setup.
Planning is not affected either. PLAN and UNPLAN work the same as always, and a plan you already announced stays exactly where it is. If your planned time happens to fall inside a quiet period, you will get the going quiet message when you send HOST, and your plan is still there waiting for you when the service comes back.
After the service is quiet
When the service is finally quiet, (ie there are no ops on the air), you can expect that it will go offline. The website will be down, and the OTA bot will stop responding to any messages.
When this happens, all you can do is try again later. There is nothing for you to fix on your end, and no settings to change. Once quiet, which could take up to two hours from the time we started going quiet, the actual maintenance work is typically pretty short. The most common reason for planned maintenance is to install operating system kernel patches, which require a reboot.
Why we do it this way
Going quiet gives a gentle ramp into planned maintenance. Once all the ops on the air go off the air and everything is quiet, then the maintenance can be done with the least impact possible.
Instead of cutting ops off in the middle, going quiet lets those ops keep running to their conclusion, instead of ruining the ops in flight when we decide to take the service down for maintenance.