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wvwunderd 'hangs'
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THogland



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
It won't be the serial port setup done by wview, that has kinda been tested by a whole bunch of folks (not to mention my initial testing) and is pretty solid Wink


Sorry - I mean the system serial port setup. I think it's auto-detecting the highest port speed, so I might force it down to 19.2 and see what happens.

Quote:
40 foot of serial cable sounds pretty likely, especially if you are wiring it up yourself.


Hey - I resemble that remark! Smile It's a 50' extension to the 8' phone wire on the console. It's decent twisted-pair wire, but 1) it was surplus, and 2) I know at least once Heavy Things (tm) have been sitting on it... So, might be time to spring for a new piece of Cat5 and see what happens.
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mteel



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

PostPosted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 10:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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.
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THogland



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:30 pm    Post subject: Serial errors Reply with quote

Quote:
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...


Yeah, a quick few minutes fiddling showed me that...

Quote:
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.


Actually, that shows that RJ-11 and RJ-45 connectors are different. Cat-5 can be used as phone cable very easily (and most modern houses use it). The wire is different, mainly in the fact that the extra wires tend to reduce interference...
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mteel



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

PostPosted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 10:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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...
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THogland



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 10:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
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...


Okay - so you're thinking that instead of using Cat5 (or standard 4-wire cable) I should splice in a piece of standard serial cable? I looked at Davis' site and according to them their extensions (up to 200') are standard 4-wire...

I can do that (I've got extra shielded serial/parallel/etc cables at work), but I'd think that quality Cat5/6 wire would work for this... Usually it's splices that ruin connections, from what I've seen.
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mteel



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

PostPosted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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
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THogland



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 4:31 pm    Post subject: Correction... Reply with quote

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
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THogland



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 7:13 pm    Post subject: Wview + WU errors Reply with quote

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.
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THogland



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 10:30 pm    Post subject: WU errors appear resolved... Reply with quote

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

-------------------
(edit)

Note:

s/radlib/libcurl

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



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 9:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
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 libcurl can be sensitive to DNS issues, but I control primary DNS (and have separate offsite secondary) so I didn't consider that.

[snip]

So, I'm guessing Mark is a genius - apparently libcurl 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


...And, wview has 36+ days uptime and still functioning properly. I know there's been at *least* two code updates at WU - all of a sudden my local city page would bring down Firefox. No crash, just looked like a clean exit. Every time you hit a city page. *Every* time... Now it's not doing that, so I have to wonder what they 'fixed'...

Now if we can just find a simple fix for the SSH script kiddies...
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mdg



Joined: 17 Jan 2006
Posts: 20

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 7:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

[quote="THogland"]
Quote:
Now if we can just find a simple fix for the SSH script kiddies...

If you mean something other than hunting them down and torturing them, check out:

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net
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THogland



Joined: 26 Sep 2005
Posts: 33

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

[quote=mdg]

Quote:
If you mean something other than hunting them down and torturing them, check out:

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net


...already running that. I was actually thinking more along the 'hunting down and killing' line...

When will they discover Google? Besides the SSH logging, they keep trying to break into vsftp, which is impossible AFAIK (it's motto seems to be, "when in doubt, lock them out" <g>)
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tome



Joined: 26 Sep 2006
Posts: 2

PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 7:59 am    Post subject: Re: wvwunderd 'hangs' Reply with quote

THogland wrote:
No idea why this is happening, but after a day or so wvwunderd stops sending data. There's no errors in the system logs (even on the verbose settings), and using the init'd script (or manually using kill-15) won't kill it - just kill -9... Killing it and restarting it doesn't upload any missing data, so the system thinks it's been working.

This is 1.81, fresh install. I've tried using the init.d/wview stop/start, and also manually stopping and starting the wvwunderd manually, but neither makes a difference.

Is there a good way to debug this, or is this a known issue?


Sorry to revive and old thread but...I am having this same issue. I have been running wview for a month or so now, and it first ran for about 14 days happily posting data to wundergound then stopped. No indications about what happened. I rebooted and it posted data for a couple more days efore stopping.

I followed this thread but I cannot attribute my problem to DNS problems that I know of. I am using Dynamic DNS but I don't think my address has changed for quite sometime (or during this period anyway).

I just restarted all the processes so it is posting again. What can I do to debug it when it stops again?

Thanks,
-Tom
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