A P25Reflector Living in a Docker Container

I wanted a simple way to quickly deploy P25Reflectors to create several talk groups on our local MMDVM driven P25 repeater. The reflector was written by https://github.com/g4klx/P25Clients I just compiled it and wrapped it into a docker container for ease of deployment.

Prerequisites

1. Install Docker.

Running

Run the line below to start the container, it will download it for you if it does not exist locally.

docker run --name TG50100 -id -p 41000:41000/udp corrosive/docker-p25reflector

You may wish to change several parameters before executing the above command.

The --name field is the name of your container, in this case I've named it to match my repeater talk group TG50100

The -p field contains the internal and external port numbers used to run the server, you may wish to change the first port listed especially if you plan to run multiple talkgroups/servers. Do NOT change second port listed as that is the internal port used by the docker container. Chaning that port will break functionality.

To ensure your container is running execute the following command.

docker ps

Starting with your system

You may wish to start the server on boot, there are varying way to do this but here it what worked for me. I first created a container for each server I wanted to run, in this example lets say you have 3 servers using 3 different ports.

docker run --name TG50100 -id -p 41000:41000/udp corrosive/docker-p25reflector
docker run --name TG50101 -id -p 41001:41000/udp corrosive/docker-p25reflector    
docker run --name TG50102 -id -p 41002:41000/udp corrosive/docker-p25reflector    

This would create 3 servers for use as 3 seperate talk groups. You would then create an sh script to restart each container that would be executed on system start up.

nano start_reflectors.sh

Inside this file you would have the following

docker restart TG50100
docker restart TG50101    
docker restart TG50102

(Save this file with Ctrl+x)

Then we edit our cron to execute on start up... run

crontab -e

If prompted just select to use nano, and then add the following to the end of your cron file.

@reboot /home/your_user_directory/start_reflectors.sh

The location is arbitrary and you can place things where you like, this is just what worked for me. Now simply restart your server and ensure the servers/talkgroups have started with

docker ps