wviewweather.com

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

wview configures the baud rate and all other relevant parameters on the serial port you choose. It doesn't matter what the system initially thinks is the highest or default baud rate.

You are barking up the wrong tree there...

And phone cable and CAT-5 are not the same thing... look at your modem and ethernet jacks on any laptop to confirm this very quickly.

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

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

OK, but you aren't making phone calls, you are trying to run RS232 signals over a phone line (or CAT-5) for long distances. RS232 is very distance sensitive and there is a reason that the VP adapter that comes out RJ-11 turns to DB-9 after 10 feet or less. Just my opinion, but my 25 foot DB-9 extension cable never has a problem and your 40 foot phone cable does...

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

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

I'm not talking about splicing anything. The cable that is provided by Davis is 4-wire telephone cable but its non-console end plugs into a DB-9 adapter, which they also provide. I run my long serial cable as DB-9 (plugged into the supplied DB-9 adapter) and have no problems.

I am not a cabling expert - I just know that RS232 is much more finicky than E&M (ear and mouth) signalling done on phone wire. Davis routes everything around on these type of cables (sensors, etc.). I think those extensions are for sensors and wired ISS's, not RS232.

Just my $0.02...

BTW, for very long distances, I think the best solution is using an ethernet serial server at the console location and running CAT-5 (as ethernet) between there and the wview host system or intermediate ethernet switch.

Mark

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

Okay - I reread all the Davis stuff, and you can run 1000' of extensions from the ISS to the console, but the max cable length they recommend between the console and PC is 50' of 4-wire. I didn't make the connection of just adding a DB9-DB9 cable onto the end - I was thinking you'd spliced it into the middle. (Apparently I need a vacation much more than I thought I did <g>)

I *think* I might be over the 50' of cable. I might just take out the old extension and add in 40' of good cable, since that'll be short enough, and if I need to go farther for some reason I know that it won't do it...

It's sounding like a good time to look for a wireless version, and use the separate receiver with the Weatherlink in it, instead of connecting it to the console Smile

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

Okay - I've shortened the cabling, and almost all of the errors have vanished. However, every few days WU stops updating. No log errors, nothing out of the ordinary, it just stops. The only consistent issue I've seen is, when it stops updating the wvwunderd daemons can't be shut down - they have to be kill -9'd and have the IPC cleaned up, then everything restarts again. (Forgetting to clean up the IPC stuff doesn't stop wvwunderd from restarting, but it very quickly hangs again - usually within a day.)

This is wview 3.21 and radlib 2.6.2. I enabled verbose logging on everything for a few days, and there's no errors at all when it hangs - things just stop.

This is Debian Stable on a Dell Poweredge 400SC. The only odd thing in the entire setup is the MTU - it's set to 1472, as my DSL starts filtering access to any site that requires a login (like eBay) if it's higher. I can't imagine that's an issue...

It has two NICs in it - I'll try changing to the other and see if it makes any difference.

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

Okay - after much grief, e-mails back and forth with our esteemed author, and some swearing and such, this appears resolved (16 days uptime, no errors). Mark mentioned that radlib can be sensitive to DNS issues, but I control primary DNS (and have separate offsite secondary) so I didn't consider that.

I rechecked all the cabling, swapped NICs, fiddled with MTU, changed out routers twice, and even turned off a couple other services (portsentry and such) in case it was causing some odd error, but nothing fixed it. Went on 3 weeks vacation right then, so set a cron job to reboot at 2am, and it mostly stayed working while I played in the sun...

While I was gone, I hit dnsreport.com to verify DNS, and it showed that one of the companies that controls four or five of the root servers was caching my old DNS info (as in, over a year out of date). I changed the serial number on DNS and restarted it, but their servers refused to update... Asked them why, and they responded with "sorry, we don't do web hosting" (i.e. "morons"). So, I renamed my DNS server, updated the zone file, pushed the change and it updated everywhere. Ever since, wview has run flawlessly...

So, I'm guessing Mark is a genius - apparently radlib was choking on a DNS lookup and hanging wvwunderd (why only that one hangs is still a mystery to me). The only errors since have been the occasional "sorry - couldn't sync the clock" (and those are rare).

Thanks for the tip, Mark - it worked Smile

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Note:

s/radlib/libcurl

<sigh> Too much time away, I think (four weeks out of the last five).

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

mdg · Joined: 17 Jan 2006 Posts: 20

[quote="THogland"]

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

[quote=mdg]

tome · Joined: 26 Sep 2006 Posts: 2