UBA PSK63 prefix contest 2016 results will wait a bit... / 2016-01-10

It seems there is some internal corruption in the fldigi program I use for amateur radio digital mode connections. Normally this shows as some strange artefacts on the screen, which means it is time to stop and start fldigi, and reset the outgoing serial number to the right number when I am busy in a contest. The more active use during a contest also seems to be a trigger.

Anyway, this internal corruption hit me hard today: right in the last minutes of the UBA PSK63 prefix contest 2016 the program hung during logging an entry, leaving me with a 0 byte logfile on disk, so all records of digimode contacts gone.

I can recover everything and still submit my results: restore the logbook.adif file from tape, add entries created after the last backup from cqrlog and add the serial numbers again to the fldigi contacts log from the fldigi text log since cqrlog copies the logentries from fldigi but without the 'contest' information. But that processing will have to wait a bit as other things take priority. The log has to be submitted before januari 17, 23:59 UTC.

Restoring the file from tape was extra interesting since I just got an error message

amrecover - can't talk to tape server: service amidxtaped: 

from amrecover. This turns out to be a known bug in amanda 3.3.0 in ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Bug #1074574 “known issue: amrecover - can't talk to tape server...” : Bugs : amanda package : Ubuntu and Bug #1077105 “amrecover - can't talk to tape server: service ami...” : Bugs : amanda package : Ubuntu. I applied the changes noted in the bugreports and after that I could restore the file.

Update: The rest of the restore operation was a matter of importing the right records back from cqrlog into fldigi and adding the serial numbers from the fldigi text log. This was just a lot of searching and typing.