Since moving to GitLab and applying CI/CD practices we stopped posting release notes for Network since these tend to happen really often. But the latest release brings along some important updates.
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Not strictly related to the release but we used this opportunity to migrate the production instance of Network to new more powerful infrastructure. Besides being faster on its own it also provided us the chance to try more advanced and extensive cache techniques. As a result the website is overall much much faster. A great example of this is the Stations page, that took several seconds to load up until last week, while now it loads almost instantly.
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Since the beginning of the project we used the dev instance of Network to test new stations. This always felt somehow wrong, The purpose of a dev instance is to test the code and verify new functionality, not to do operations. In order to move away from this anti-pattern, we created a Milestone for working on things we identified as necessary in order to open up registration on the Network. That time has come. From now on all new ground stations should be created on network.satnogs.org. All new ground stations start in a
Testingmode, where failed observations don’t mess up with Station or Satellite success rates. This gives the chance to operators to try out things and switch their Station to online mode once they know that it’s fully functional. We are in the process of updating the relevant documentation to reflect these changes, but any help with that would be much appreciated. On a final note permissions remain unchanged. So creating a new account alone is not enough for someone to schedule observations.