Chat. cruise, 5-01 - Beacon Alert

[Marty Hoag]

   One thing you should be aware of.  The current NLANR multicast beacon
(v0.51 for the beacon itself) is limited to something like 20 beacons. 
If there are more beacons than that it seems the report thread in the
BEACON crashes BUT THE BEACON KEEPS RUNNING.  

   This can be rather confusing since a beacon will NOT appear in the
viewer unless it is also reporting to the server but may show up in the
"ps" output as running.  At the moment there are something like 19
beacons running (at least there are that many being heard here) but only
10 on the viewer.  If you are running the beacon from the command line
you may see the errors
 java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 2048
         at Report.createReportBuffer(Report.java:150)
         at Report.run(Report.java:57)
when this happens.

   The only solution I know of is to kill and restart the beacon which
is not showing up on the server.  As long as we stay under the magic
limit we should be ok.

   There is a new beacon being tested (v0.6x) that will allow for 70-80
beacons in the group.  It will also provide for web access to the server
data and uses TCP instead UDP for viewer data from the server (still
uses UDP for beacon reports to server which are much smaller).  I think
Bob wants to make sure that is stable before making everyone upgrade
their beacons.

   Marty