wviewweather.com

rcrowe · Joined: 12 Mar 2006 Posts: 3

Greetings,

Yesterday I had a brief power outage, and it took me a while to get my computer back up. Today I noticed that the 'low' temperature of record for the month is 0 degrees (which it wasn't -- this is southern California). I snoop around a bit and notice that the archive records for yesterday, March 11, 2006 stop at 16:30. I suspect this is the cause, as I can find no other 0 records.

Probably related: i noticed this morning that wviewd was not running (it apparently had some issues when the system rebooted yesterday, don't know exactly why but it was a generally troublesome reboot) so I fired up the rc script this morning. It apparently generated missing records based on data stored in the envoy, at least the records for march 12 are complete, but it didn't fill in the missing records from march 11.

I'm using 1.9.0 on FreeBSD 5.0. Is there a way of re-generating the archive records?

TIA,

Bob

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

If they are not stored in the envoy, the answer is no, there is no way. If they are, you could hand edit the WLK file to remove all records after yesterday at 16:30 - but that requires record deletion AND header modification. Tricky business. If you are running anything longer than a 5 minute archive interval, the easy solution is to move the 2006-03.wlk file out of /var/wview/archive and let wview regenerate it from the envoy archive store.

You definitely need to upgrade soon - you are running a pretty old version of wview. I doubt that would have mattered in your power loss situation. I would be concerned that the envoy didn't start back up properly after the power loss and didn't store records for some period of time.

Consider a UPS for both the envoy and the wview host.

HTH,
Mark

rcrowe · Joined: 12 Mar 2006 Posts: 3

Thanks Mark,

I figured that might be the case, and a UPS (for both) is on the short list now. I was thinking that perhaps wviewd got, but didn't record the records from the envoy. The reason I say that is that when I finally did realize it wasn't running (about 7am this morning) and restarted it, it did fill in the missing records from midnight on the 12th. It just didn't fill in the records from 16:30 yesterday through midnight. There was nothing special that happened at midnight, so I suspected the software just didn't record yesterdays records (how well does it handle recording multi-day outages?)

It's curious that wview is reporting 0 for the period where the records don't exist. It seems it would be desirable to simply ignore time slots for which there are no records, rather than defaulting them to 0, any plans for that in the future? (or perhaps this illustrates my complete lack of understanding how this software works!)

Any pointers to the manual editing of the wlk files? Where would I get the best description of these? it's been a few years since I've programmed but I think I can still read and understand C well enough to do that. How much work are we talking about here? (Like would this be a good utility tool to write ?)

Thanks for making this great software available!

Bob

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

rcrowe · Joined: 12 Mar 2006 Posts: 3

Mark, thanks for your help. I did upgrade a while back to 3.2.1, and it's worked quite well since. I've also put both the envoy and the host on a UPS, so power outages should no longer be a significant issue. However, I still get false low readings for March 11, 2006 (I get zeros, which are probably from the archive data being corrupt). Is there any way to either 1) exclude a specific date in the archive records -- either purging it from the archive data or ignoring it while parsing them, or 2) ignoring certain values of data, like a temperature reading of exactly 0 degrees F (it never gets that cold here) or a barometric pressure of 0, etc... I'd rather not blow away all of the archive data if there is an alternative.

Thanks again for any advice,

Bob