wviewweather.com

mdg · Joined: 17 Jan 2006 Posts: 20

I'm having a problem with wvwunderd dying when it can't resolve the weatherstation.wunderground.com hostname. I've seen it a couple times before, but it doesn't happen that often. Once it was because my cable modem went out. I'm not sure what happened this time, but CWOP submissions kept working.

Here is the last entry in the log file:

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

I have this problem as well when my ISP's DNS server stops responding for short periods of time. The wunderground daemon uses libcurl to do HTTP transactions (because the wunderground folks want it that way) while CWOP uses a telnet-like interface which just opens a TCP/IP socket to the CWOP server, writes the data, then closes the socket. This is a much simpler, more robust interface.

Wunderground has implemented that "rapid-fire" nonsense and I have had problems with it since they did. Timeouts on data transfers, DNS resolution problems, etc. If they have the primary DNS server of record for wunderground.com on their data-receiving server (getting stupid "every 10 second" updates from rapid-fire clients), then this could explain both problems.

I have disabled wunderground on my station...

As I've said before, someone at wunderground didn't fully consider the ramifications of the kind of network traffic generated by "rapid-fire". It renders their normal service sometimes as "slow-motion-fire" or "non-responsive-fire".

We can't solve these problems - only the wunderground folks can. I will look into why the wvwunderd daemon does not seem to recover well - but it may lie in the curl library itself.

Mark