Hey, the title rhymes!
I spent the past couple of days getting most of my Linux VMs set up on CentOS 8: the two that aren’t are the PowerChute appliance and my UniFi Controller. One of the VMs was set up as an APRS iGate using Xastir on Fedora previously, so I had to come up with a solution on CentOS 8. I ended up going with Aprx, which had a minor issue: I use the Kenwood TM-D710A’s internal TNC for my station, and it has to speak KISS mode to work with Aprx. To the Bigger Brain I went… and found something pretty rad. David Ranch, KI6ZHD, wrote a utility in C to put the D710 into TNC mode that is downloadable from here.
With that in hand, I booted the VM with the minimal ISO, and once I was up and running I did my usual tasks: enable EPEL with PowerTools and ELRepo, disable SELinux and firewalld, run the first update, then reboot.
Upon that first reboot, I then ran “dnf install -y clang gcc make” and compiled the software by typing “clang -o tmd710_tncsetup tmd710_tncsetup.c” at my user shell. After that I used sudo to copy it to /usr/bin and downloaded Aprx, extracted the tarball, then changed to its directory, did the “./configure && make” and it errored out: I needed Perl. A quick “dnf install -y perl” later and I ran the previous command again, and the application built! A “make install” later and it was in /sbin ready to be set up as a service.
I proceeded to edit /etc/aprx.conf as needed and did a test run: at first it didn’t work, then I used the tmd710_tncsetup utility and was up and running. Next step was to enable start at boot…
I created systemd unit files for both tmd710_tncsetup and Aprx, did a test reboot, and a few seconds after the login prompt appeared I heard a packet burst from my TH-D74’s speaker and the position appeared in the radio’s log.
I have confidence this will Just Work(TM) going forward. The tmd710_tncsetup service will set the D710’s TNC to KISS mode, and Aprx depends on that to start, so if the power goes out entirely, once it comes back up, the iGate will be back up and running!
Running this as a virtual machine on a VMware host vs. a Raspberry Pi is probably wasteful, but who cares? It’s fun!