Author Topic: Aculink Outage (Read 4896 times)

DoctorKnow · « **on:** January 25, 2015, 05:33:40 PM »

Seems the aculink MBW is Effed up again. It also causes the bridge to lose it's ability to read the sensors pings for whatever reason, even the barometer.

I am wondering if the acurite folks have simply just put too many folks on their system for what it is capable of?

Bushman · « **Reply #1 on:** January 25, 2015, 06:53:30 PM »

Mine is fine. Accessing my backyard and house from 300 miles away.

DoctorKnow · « **Reply #2 on:** January 25, 2015, 07:00:50 PM »

Quote from: Bushman on January 25, 2015, 06:53:30 PM

Mine is fine. Accessing my backyard and house from 300 miles away.

It seems to be back at the moment. The company acknowledged the outage.

skysummit · « **Reply #3 on:** January 26, 2015, 02:23:30 AM »

I noticed that earlier tonight. At first I thought it was my station, but I remember it being mentioned a couple days ago or so about an Aculink outage. Thankfully, I just use my bridge to send the data to the Aculink site. I have a laptop with Weather Display doing all the other work.

vreihen · « **Reply #4 on:** January 28, 2015, 07:53:35 PM »

Anyone else notice problems between 2:30-5:05 PM EST today? My station dropped off of WU for lack of updates, and MBW's last update stamps on each sensor were all over the place as well.....

nincehelser · « **Reply #5 on:** January 28, 2015, 08:13:32 PM »

Quote from: vreihen on January 28, 2015, 07:53:35 PM

Anyone else notice problems between 2:30-5:05 PM EST today? My station dropped off of WU for lack of updates, and MBW's last update stamps on each sensor were all over the place as well.....

Nothing noted here. Logs all look good.

DoctorKnow · « **Reply #6 on:** January 28, 2015, 08:51:32 PM »

Quote from: nincehelser on January 28, 2015, 08:13:32 PM

Quote from: vreihen on January 28, 2015, 07:53:35 PM
Anyone else notice problems between 2:30-5:05 PM EST today? My station dropped off of WU for lack of updates, and MBW's last update stamps on each sensor were all over the place as well.....

Nothing noted here. Logs all look good.

My stuff looks normal. I am even mixing it up with the tower sensor as my temperature reading.

DoctorKnow · « **Reply #7 on:** February 08, 2015, 07:17:47 AM »

Aculink had another outage last night. For an hour. For a while, into this time, I was able to send temperature data from a tower sensor on my meteobridge, but not data from the 5 in 1. Interesting.

I also lost about 20 minutes of some data from CWOP, but not the full hour outage. I found the topic on acurite support going on and wanted to just get that info out to those who may be looking into what is going on.

Code: [Select]

07 Feb 10:27 pm EST	42	24	48		SSW	2G04	30.14	30.126	0.00	OK
07 Feb 10:17 pm EST	42	23	47		SW	3G03	30.14	30.126	0.00	OK
07 Feb 10:07 pm EST	42				SW	4G04			0.00	OK
07 Feb 9:53 pm EST					S	3G03			0.00	OK
07 Feb 9:36 pm EST	44				S	1G01			0.00	OK
07 Feb 9:23 pm EST	45	22	40		S	3G05	30.15	30.136	0.00	OK
07 Feb 9:12 pm EST	46	23	40		S	3G05	30.15	30.136	0.00	OK

Good luck.

DoctorKnow · « **Reply #8 on:** February 08, 2015, 07:50:52 AM »

Looks like the site is down again this morning!!!! This is getting really frustrating.

Bushman · « **Reply #9 on:** February 08, 2015, 10:03:10 AM »

FIne here now...

vreihen · « **Reply #10 on:** February 08, 2015, 01:53:01 PM »

Quote from: DoctorKnow on February 08, 2015, 07:50:52 AM

Looks like the site is down again this morning!!!! This is getting really frustrating.

I ordered "Plan B" from Amazon earlier in the week:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A81ISJ6/

This device was recommended in the MeteoBridge section here for converting the USB signal to connect an Acu-Rite (or other) console to a MeteoBridge router. Since I am only reporting the 5-in-1 data to WU with MeteoBridge, I really don't need the Acu-Rite bridge and MBW any more. I haven't switched over yet, mostly because I don't know how the barometer reading will change when I swap the bridge's barometer for the 1035 USB console. However, I'm putting Acu-Rite on notice that I *do* have an exit strategy

if they don't get their MBW act together.....

nincehelser · « **Reply #11 on:** February 08, 2015, 02:25:32 PM »

I'm starting to wonder if a janitor is unplugging some IT gear to run his vacuum.

vreihen · « **Reply #12 on:** February 08, 2015, 03:07:07 PM »

Quote from: nincehelser on February 08, 2015, 02:25:32 PM

I'm starting to wonder if a janitor is unplugging some IT gear to run his vacuum.

That was a life support machine in the hospital room and a floor buffer.

I'm wondering if Acu-Rite's holiday sales of MBW-capable weather stations isn't overloading their current server infrastructure?????

DoctorKnow · « **Reply #13 on:** February 08, 2015, 03:30:39 PM »

I don't know much about servers, but when Acurite started the idea of the bridge to their weather machine, they should have planned very carefully how they would handle the load from all these customers wanting their data shared... In reality, we should not have to resort to all these different methods to get our weather on the maps. Acurite should have just skipped the Aculink weather widgets. It's too complicated, but use something like the bridge webpage with the toggle button, and let us use just a little bandwidth to upload to 3 or 4 sites, with one rapidfire option.

nincehelser · « **Reply #14 on:** February 08, 2015, 03:31:46 PM »

Quote from: vreihen on February 08, 2015, 03:07:07 PM

Quote from: nincehelser on February 08, 2015, 02:25:32 PM
I'm starting to wonder if a janitor is unplugging some IT gear to run his vacuum.

That was a life support machine in the hospital room and a floor buffer. I'm wondering if Acu-Rite's holiday sales of MBW-capable weather stations isn't overloading their current server infrastructure?????

I'm guessing that's a large part of it. Or perhaps they're running into some sort of license limitation (e.g. number of database connections). Or maybe a bad load-balancing configuration.

Someone posted the dates and times of the outages of the last couple months. It's interesting to note that 6 of the 7 outages occurred during the weekend. Only one happened during the week and that was during normal office hours.

I wonder if that pattern reflects consumer usage patterns or lack of IT monitoring (or both).

vreihen · « **Reply #15 on:** February 08, 2015, 07:39:09 PM »

...or just that we're having *another* storm here in the northeast, which seems to corollate with many of MBW's outages/hiccups.....

DoctorKnow · « **Reply #16 on:** February 10, 2015, 08:10:32 AM »

The Aculink and Meteobridge are down again, and hav been for an hour.

SlothRocket · « **Reply #17 on:** February 10, 2015, 08:41:21 AM »

Same for me. Very frustrating!

gardengrub · « **Reply #18 on:** February 10, 2015, 08:47:39 AM »

Same Here. I'm beginning to think that the Bridge can't continue to function unless MBY is up. I'm curious to know how its firmware functions. I'm wondering if it is programmed to reboot if it does not receive a specific response from the Acurite server when it attempts to upload data. So, when it looses contact with the mothership it begins its reboot cycle and thus the Meteobridge is left with no data to sniff.

DoctorKnow · « **Reply #19 on:** February 10, 2015, 08:55:42 AM »

I had to actually unplug / Reboot the Meteobridge D-Link Router this time before data started flowing to sites or even showing up in the Live data tab.

(after Aculink came back on)

SlothRocket · « **Reply #20 on:** February 10, 2015, 09:08:26 AM »

I had to do the same thing. All is good for the right now.

nincehelser · « **Reply #21 on:** February 10, 2015, 09:52:48 AM »

They posted to expect issues today:

The AcuLink servers that host the My Backyard Weather software and app may experience slow performance, and possibly a brief outage, sometime on 2/10.

This maintenance is a cloud server upgrade. There is no action required on your part and the AcuRite product should not be affected, however if you experience any issues, please try unplugging the power source for 10 seconds and then power back up again.

If you have any questions or experience any issues, please post them here in our online support forum.

Thank you,

The AcuRite Team

nincehelser · « **Reply #22 on:** February 10, 2015, 10:04:26 AM »

Quote from: gardengrub on February 10, 2015, 08:47:39 AM

Same Here. I'm beginning to think that the Bridge can't continue to function unless MBY is up. I'm curious to know how its firmware functions. I'm wondering if it is programmed to reboot if it does not receive a specific response from the Acurite server when it attempts to upload data. So, when it looses contact with the mothership it begins its reboot cycle and thus the Meteobridge is left with no data to sniff.

I use a Raspberry Pi setup that allows me to run independently of MBW. I designed it for times when my link to the Internet might go down for issues like severe weather.

My scripts don't look for a response code from MBW. Under normal circumstances, however, it does return the string:

{ "success": 1, "checkversion": "126" }

after each transmission. I've never caught it changing, but that "126" probably refers to the most recent version number of the firmware available.

During the last outage, I was only getting the "success" code half the time. I'm not sure if that means half the data was being lost, or if MBW was just too sick to respond properly.

vreihen · « **Reply #23 on:** February 10, 2015, 06:43:10 PM »

Quote from: nincehelser on February 10, 2015, 10:04:26 AM

My scripts don't look for a response code from MBW. Under normal circumstances, however, it does return the string:

{ "success": 1, "checkversion": "126" }

after each transmission. I've never caught it changing, but that "126" probably refers to the most recent version number of the firmware available.

How difficult could it be to make a web site that simply sends the above response and can be called via DNS spoofing?

Look, ma! I just replaced MBW!

Code: [Select]

<?php
echo "{ \"success\": 1, \"checkversion\": \"126\" }";
?>

What do I need to name the file on my web server so that the posting URL "works" when the bridge calls it? I'm surprised that MeteoBridge hasn't done this already.....

nincehelser · « **Reply #24 on:** February 10, 2015, 07:28:04 PM »

Quote from: vreihen on February 10, 2015, 06:43:10 PM

Quote from: nincehelser on February 10, 2015, 10:04:26 AM
My scripts don't look for a response code from MBW. Under normal circumstances, however, it does return the string:

{ "success": 1, "checkversion": "126" }

after each transmission. I've never caught it changing, but that "126" probably refers to the most recent version number of the firmware available.

How difficult could it be to make a web site that simply sends the above response and can be called via DNS spoofing?

Look, ma! I just replaced MBW!

Code: [Select]
<?php echo "{ \"success\": 1, \"checkversion\": \"126\" }"; ?>
What do I need to name the file on my web server so that the posting URL "works" when the bridge calls it? I'm surprised that MeteoBridge hasn't done this already.....

That should work. My first version used a web server to mimic MBW, but I found it was easier to do it at the network level.

Some prefer to use a web app to interpret the data just as MBW would and avoid using tcpdump.

It's six of one, half-dozen of the other. Pick whichever fits your programming preferences.

Anyway, this is the url the bridge is using:

http://www.acu-link.com/messages

News:

Author Topic: Aculink Outage (Read 4896 times)