SmartLink service needs to be more robust | FlexRadio Community

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I can see that there are a quite a number of posts and with that occasions when the SmartLink Service has been down for remote action.

If a service like SmartLink is needed for users to run remote then one would expect to have a design with uptime guarantee 99.99% isch.

So for the moment I would say we are having a bad design and I can see this as a showstopper for to promote FLEX remote usage, at least based on SmartLink-platform.

A more selfcontained solution based on VPN is probably the better option until SmartLink gets more reliable.

What is your view and/or the official statement from Flex ?

Thank you in advance / Tilman SM0JZT

Tilman D Thulesius

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Posted 10 months ago

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Brian Morgan VK7RR/4

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I do not agree. There have been very few outages with Smartlink. I venture to suggest that we have more with our service provider.

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217 Posts
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I haven't experienced any down time with SmartLink. I do a lot of remote access with SmartLink and found it very reliable. The few times I have experienced issues I found it to be not SmartLink problems but with my local service or the 3rd party service I was trying to use.
I don't know the details of your failures but I would question other network issues instead of SmartLink.

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I blame the Uzure service which I think is by Microsoft. Surely we should expect better reliability than this from Microsoft?

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With an ever increasing number of users of SmartLink, Flex should publish a document which clearly states their uptime objectives and how they will deal with growth. As a small company, they are completely dependent on 3rd party suppliers. I would suggest Flex provide full support for VPN protocols like OpenVPN which is very popular and has phone/tablet apps as well. Currently Flex radios are not compatible with OpenVPN, so users VPN users must resort to SoftEther which is much less user friendly than OpenVPN. Old protocols like PPTP are not supported by Apple any more, for example.

2018-09-05T08:41:14+00:00

Tilman D Thulesius

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Right. This is what I think we schould be asking for. A statement on what could be expected from the service.

It is fine that it seems to work most of the time. But what is needed is a official statement on quality and process.

Again . I would also like to have a OpenVPN alternative, where one would have a selfcontained solution.

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2018-09-05T19:08:06+00:00

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The idea is very simple. The Flex service will be as reliable as the Microsoft Service. I take it that you all have expressed your dissatisfaction with Microsoft?

Is Flex responsible if the remote site has a power outage?

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Kari Gustafsson SM0HRP, Elmer

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I do not agree with your statement that SmartLink is not enough robust. I have been using it extensively since it's release over a year ago. Including 48 hour contests and I have never experienced a down time. Never. And I am quite demanding with respect to my contest needs.

As I provide quite a bit of support for Flex users I must say that many times "down time" issues of SmartLink are related to router, PC, broadband network access or other non Flex hardware problems. Sometimes issues are regarding registration issues of SmartLink it self. But this has nothing to do with robustness.

Of course, VPN is an alternative but the I do not see it as a simple user friendly alternative. I have used Softether myself and it works fine. But to be able to easily work from several platforms; PC, smartphone, iOS makes SmartLink the obvious choice for me even though I consider myself quite technically oriented in this respect.

(Edited)

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What is currently the status? Are connections already possible with Smartlink?

I am waiting to register my newly purchased 6400 for remote used with the Maestro. Since yesterday evening 23:00 LT I was not possible to reach the server, even not login with my Smartlink account

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Still not up as of this time. 11:00 UTC 9/5/18 Flex is aware of the problem and hopefully it will be resolved very soon.

(Edited)

Michael Walker, Official Rep

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Official Response

Our Smart Link Service relies on Microsoft Azure to manage the authentication process. Like you, we are a customer waiting for our services to be made available.

This is the update from Microsoft as of 15 minutes ago. And, from my tests, it looks like things are starting to come up, but it might be a few more hours for them to be at 100%. Lots of boxes to restart here.

I just tested my iPhone on SmartSDR and it came right up.

PRELIMINARY ROOT CAUSE: A severe weather event, including lightning strikes, occurred near one of the South Central US datacenters. This resulted in a power voltage increase that impacted cooling systems. Automated datacenter procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect and critical hardware entered a structured power down process.

ENGINEERING STATUS: Engineers have restored access to storage resources for the majority of services, and customers should be seeing signs of recovery. Engineers are continuing to work on any residual storage impact to fully mitigate this issue. The current mitigation workflow is outlined below:

1) Restore power to the South Central US datacenter (COMPLETED)
2) Recover software load balancers for Azure Storage scale units in South Central US (COMPLETED)
3) Recover impacted Azure Storage scale units in South Central US. (Mostly complete)
4) Recover the remaining Storage-dependent services in South Central US (Mostly complete)

(Edited)

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Thanks for the great explanation Michael. Can't prevent mother nature from doing her thing. You are always right on top of these issues! Best 73 de N4WRW. Rick

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Azure has availability zones all over the world across all human inhabited continents. By having SmartLink run in more than one availability zone it can be 100% bulletproof. So the real issue here is if SL is designed to be highly available.

2018-09-05T19:13:40+00:00

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That is a Microsoft issue also, and people would then demand that Flex cure their horrible latency issue. The entire concept of radio by internet is going to expose the radio users to the internet and it's issues. DDOS and local issues like the number of users simply will affect the service as we add layers of complexity to our hamming.

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I work in IT and several of the cloud services that we use were down yesterday. It wasn't just smartlink. Many Microsoft 365 services were down yesterday. Sometimes stuff happens....

Burch-K4QXX

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Ever played with the Icom 7610? Although it doesn't compare to the Flex, it has a stand-alone server. It never fails unless the radio or the LAN/WAN fails. Perhaps it is possible to change the design philosophy with the same strategy as Icom? I never use Smartlink as the Asus OpenVPN is far superior. It is a kick in the head to use FT8 remotely.

(Edited)

2018-09-05T15:06:46+00:00

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Flex is a server.

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2018-09-05T19:18:28+00:00

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And if you are willing to put up with a lesser radio, get a 7610. I shook our new one down last week, and it is meh. Reinforced my decision to go with Flex. And FWIW, I have two Icoms in the shack.

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Mike - VE3CKO, Elmer

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Flex is just one user of that particular data center and just a very small percentile of users in the overall picture. If a company like Microsoft is vulnerable with all their billion dollar resources, it is very unrealistic for ham radio users to demand more than what Flex is using. This is a hobby.
I'm sure appreciative that they decided to farm out SmartLink servers with a large data center as compared to maintaining their own server in a bathroom closet.

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Thanks for the update Michael.
As a power engineer in a datacentre, I'm fully aware of the nightmare Microsoft must be having over this outage. It's nowhere near as simple as flicking a switch back on, or simply rebooting a few servers or the odd router. They have to be brought back up "gracefully" and likely in a particular order. And that is if the software hasn't been corrupted and has to be reloaded from backup, the PSU's haven't blown and need to be replaced, blah blah.......

Let's cut Flex some slack here. It's a Microsoft issue that's affecting a lot of customers. It's also likely that there'll be some business giants hosted there (far far bigger than Flex) and they'll be first in line to get their pound of flesh........

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But there will always be people who think you can just blow the whole sytem up and it should work..lol

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Well all I can say about this is we're a hobby. I would never expect 99.99. Oh well if it's broke they'll fix it. In the meantime call your buddies on the local simplex frequency if you need a ham fix.

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2018-09-05T15:55:58+00:00

Larry Williamson

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I totally agree-----this is a hobby guys! Cheyenne MT. (Norad bunker) does not require 100%! We are acting like it's a life or death situation here with our little hobby radios.

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2018-09-05T17:17:21+00:00

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But this is an oportunity for the EXPERTS to say Flex did it all wrong.

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2018-09-05T19:29:56+00:00

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Amen, Bill. I am a little surprised that so many people have the internet stacked on top of their radio game, and expect no problems ever. That is simply not realistic.

Things like losing the cloud service, DDOS attacks, Internet outages and slowdowns are 100 percent certain to happen. I have a fast connection. But at certain times it isn't for one reason or another. I've lost it a few times and had to reset and reboot the router. All things that would take the Flex remote or Icom's remote service down.

We're smart people. If we incorporate an outside service like the Internet into our radio use, we should learn the limitations of the internet just like we should know how to operate our radios.

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2018-09-05T19:57:07+00:00

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How 'bout this one we use as amateurs to pitch the hobby: "When all else fails (ie. The Internet), there's always radio" :< )

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2018-09-05T20:20:09+00:00

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Here a happy user now

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Steve K9ZW, Elmer

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If "the net" is broke, it's broke.

Affected a lot more than SmartLink. Microsoft lost parts of their Office 365 and other cloud services for some clients.

As a reminder it is possible to run your shack remotely WITHOUT SmartLink. Many did this with various VPN setups long before SmartLink.

It is of course possible to break those too - whether the individual VPN or overall connectivity.

Even with SmartLink mostly being up I've kept my Raspberry-Pi based VPN system on the ready.

This may be a useful idea for those of us who really would be put out by other outages.

Additionally redundant options might appeal (I know I like to have options.)

While we think of redundancy, it is a good time to think of what happens when the mains power goes down, and if we have enough "shack spares" on hand to bridge a critical failure?

I know I have been a bit lazy on sorting some of these items out.

While a person may not need a hot-swappable shack with full backups, it might be a good idea to have a "Plan B" configuration if items go down or need to be taken offline for service.

Great thoughts Tilman SM0JZT and everyone else. I know you made me think about how robust I have my end setup and what my fallback alternatives are.

73

Steve
K9ZW

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When I first experienced the outage and thought about it I thought, well no big deal and like some have commented, this is a hobby and a little potential inconvenient is nothing important. However, after reflecting a little more, I have slightly changed my views. Although ham radio is primarily a hobby and not a necessity, there are times when it is critical for the community. My club for example has a very active RACES Group and is a significant component of the county emergency services plan. It occurred to me that remote access to Flex equipment could be very important in an emergency. It is something that communities around the world depend on. Just a thought that Flex may want to factor into their approach for remote access and support.

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Michael Walker, Official Rep

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Thanks guys for all your opinions. I know your thoughts will be reviewed.

One last thing, and that is if your remote operation is mission critical for what every reason, you do need to ensure that you personally limit your single points of failures. Every remote operator goes through this. In this case, having a Softether VPN in place might not be a bad Plan B.

Again, thanks for all your comments.

Mike

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