QUALADJUST

Name

QUALADJUST -- NetRom Quality Manipulation.

Description

This file describes a feature which allows you to reduce the NetRom quality of "foreign" nodes on your system, or to exclude certain nodes or groups of nodes altogether.

With ever-increasing connectivity via the Internet, the NetRom network is bypassing national and geographical boundaries, and this is causing problems. Because Internet qualities are much higher than radio qualities, there are far more nodes in the tables. In some cases there may be a limit to the size of tables, and more importantly there is a limit to the number of nodes that can be broadcast on a low bandwidth RF channel.

In addition, with too many nodes in the table the "N" commands become useless because the response becomes too large for the user to download on a limited bandwidth channel. Even if there is sufficient bandwidth, the response may occupy several pages and the user may not be able to review anything which has scrolled off the screen.

Experience has shown that 150 nodes is roughly the maximum comfortable table size. But how do you decide *which* 150 nodes to include? How do you achieve the balance between slow, unreliable, radio-routed nodes and fast, reliable, Internet-routed ones?

Some people advocate setting low route qualities for the Internet links, but unless everyone agrees on those qualities, this can lead to traffic being routed via slow, unreliable links when faster and more direct routes exist!

And do you want your table full of high quality internet-routed foreign nodes, to the exclusion of your local RF nodes? Can your users find the nodes they want, amidst the clutter?

Quality de-rating by callsign can help with this management issue. It allows you to de-rate the NetRom quality of a node or group of nodes based on the NetRom callsign, instead of the route on which they were received.

Thus, no matter what relative route qualities you use, you can change the relative qualities to favour your local nodes, or (more likely) those which share your language.

Options

This feature uses the global QUALADJUST keyword as follows:

	QUALADJUST <call | "default"> <0-255>

For example:

	QUALADJUST DEFAULT 120
	QUALADJUST G* 255
	QUALADJUST ZL* 200

The "default" argument sets the default value which is used to de-rate all nodes not matched by any other QUALADJUST statement. The normal NetRom de-rate algorithm is used, so 255 gives no de-rate and 0 gives full de-rate (i.e. to block a callsign or group of callsigns). If there are no QUALADJUST statements the default is 255.

Limitations

QUALADJUST is applied to neighbour nodes and all nodes learned from NetRom broadcasts. It is NOT applied to nodes learned via INP3 because they have no quality to de-rate, and is not applied to nodes entered by a NODE ADD command or an entry in the XRNODES file.

Caveats

This is an experimental feature. Please use it with caution.

See also

AUTOQUAL(9) -- Automatic Route Quality.
NODES(1) -- Display / Modify the Nodes table.
QUALITY(2) -- Display / Set default quality for a port.
XRNODES(8) -- Routes / Nodes Recovery File.