Author Topic: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information  (Read 2328 times)

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Offline twcmaster

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Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« on: April 02, 2020, 07:41:16 PM »
Good Evening, I just received this e-mail and wanted to share:

Dear WeatherLink IP Owner,
 
The WeatherLink IP firmware version that you are running has a Mandatory Update. Without performing this update, in a matter of days (April 10th) historical data will only be updated once a week, resulting in week-long delays in getting your historic records. On June 1, 2020 you will lose access to all historical and current web, app and API data.
 
To fix this problem, do one of the following:
 
April 10, 2020
Historic web, app and API data (archive records) will only be updated once a week, resulting in week-long delay in getting your historic records. Current data will continue to display on the web, apps and the API.
 
May 1, 2020
Historic web, app and API data (archive records) will no longer be processed. Current data will continue to display on the web, apps and the API.
 
June 1, 2020
Historic (archive records) and current web, app and API data will no longer be processed. All data will become stale unless one of the three options is completed.
 
We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience. We are doing everything we can to continually process your data, but are unable to continue operations without this critical update.
 

Davis Instruments Inc., 3465 Diablo Ave, Hayward, CA 94545






Online Mattk

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #1 on: April 02, 2020, 08:13:46 PM »
Well the cause of this is of their own making. So wonder if the issue is driving Davis servers up the wall and/or a convenient means to eliminate the good old WLIP that is obviously giving Davis a headache as it can not be subscripted?

Offline casacota

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #2 on: April 03, 2020, 12:30:20 AM »
Note that you can upgrade OR buy a Weatherlink Pro subscription to solve it, besides to migrate to WLL. This shows clearly the way they are taking.

Online Mattk

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #3 on: April 03, 2020, 01:04:05 AM »
Note that you can upgrade OR buy a Weatherlink Pro subscription to solve it, besides to migrate to WLL. This shows clearly the way they are taking.

But a WeatherLink Pro Subscription does not fix the WLIP issue.

Offline johnd

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #4 on: April 03, 2020, 04:02:26 AM »
Note that you can upgrade OR buy a Weatherlink Pro subscription to solve it, besides to migrate to WLL. This shows clearly the way they are taking.

The Pro plan comment is completely wrong I'm afraid. As Mattk says this has nothing to do with the WLIP issue, which AIUI is caused by the WLIP device trying to upload far too much data once the 1/1/20 date clicked over and as a result flooding the weatherlink.com servers with the same bulk data over and over again. Davis need to stop this happening once and for all. The cause is almost certainly a programming oversight made many years ago but the only fix possible (other than the measures they're threatening) is for users to update the WLIP firmware.
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Offline casacota

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #5 on: April 03, 2020, 05:59:57 AM »
Note that you can upgrade OR buy a Weatherlink Pro subscription to solve it, besides to migrate to WLL. This shows clearly the way they are taking.

The Pro plan comment is completely wrong I'm afraid. As Mattk says this has nothing to do with the WLIP issue, which AIUI is caused by the WLIP device trying to upload far too much data once the 1/1/20 date clicked over and as a result flooding the weatherlink.com servers with the same bulk data over and over again. Davis need to stop this happening once and for all. The cause is almost certainly a programming oversight made many years ago but the only fix possible (other than the measures they're threatening) is for users to update the WLIP firmware.

I'm sorry, but the mail states:

To fix this problem, do one of the following:

then 3 options. See yourself:

« Last Edit: April 03, 2020, 06:03:11 AM by casacota »

Online Mattk

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #6 on: April 03, 2020, 07:54:36 AM »
What Davis are really saying there is, buy WLL for 25% off and throw away your WLIP (if you don't upgrade to 1.15), oh how bloody convenient for Davis.

That's not really an option (as such), that is a con.

Offline johnd

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #7 on: April 03, 2020, 08:18:24 AM »
I'm sorry, but the mail states:

To fix this problem, do one of the following:

then 3 options. See yourself:

OK, well that's the first time that the full email has been posted with mention of buying Pro. It may be that Davis are saying that they're prepared to allow users who refuse to upgrade their firmware to effectively pay for the (considerable AIUI) extra data handling that's necessary at AWS by buying a Pro plan. But another interpretation is that the Pro plan will allow you to retain access to past data only. It's difficult to tell from the wording of the email.
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Offline mstan

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #8 on: April 03, 2020, 08:42:53 AM »
What kind of changes does this make to your IP Data Logger?

Offline johnd

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #9 on: April 03, 2020, 09:17:14 AM »
What kind of changes does this make to your IP Data Logger?

What kind of changes does what make??? Are you referring to the firmware update??? Well, no-one outside of Davis will know for sure but, as far as I'm aware, just the absolute minimum of changes to fix this specific date bug.
Prodata Weather Systems
Prodata's FAQ/support site for Davis stations
Includes many details on 6313 Weatherlink console.
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Sorry, but I don't usually have time to help with individual issues by email unless you are a Prodata customer. Please post your issue in the relevant forum section here & I will comment there if I have anything useful to add.

Offline casacota

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #10 on: April 03, 2020, 10:51:20 AM »
What kind of changes does this make to your IP Data Logger?

One substantial change is at least that you can no longer adjust the time on the console. In most european countries the meteorological data are running on UTC. With the update the station changes to your time zone, including DST, and you cannot change this. For professional or half professional use is Davis here no longer an option, since WLL shows the same behavior. This added to the need of a subscription to acces the OWN data makes Davis stations unusable for such uses.
People are now going to Ecowitt with good reasons. Game over.

Offline mcrossley

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #11 on: April 03, 2020, 11:23:11 AM »
But the WLL does provide all its data in UTC, as does the API for wl.com?
Mark

Offline galfert

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #12 on: April 03, 2020, 01:24:45 PM »
Well, get ready for the influx of people after April 10....."Help my historical data is not working!"   :roll:
How many will not read their emails, or not read this thread, or not search before asking for help after several other threads spawn for the very same issue?

I can't wait. /s

Hopefully it won't be as bad as greendotgate.


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Offline Old Tele man

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #13 on: April 03, 2020, 02:06:32 PM »
As an unknown curmudgeon once mumbled, "Ain't nothing free, especially if you had to pay for it."

Davis is beginning to sound like a WX-version of Microsoft: Fix one thing, break three things; blues screens for all as a 'feature.'
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Online Mattk

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #14 on: April 03, 2020, 04:40:47 PM »
As an unknown curmudgeon once mumbled, "Ain't nothing free, especially if you had to pay for it."
.....

This is something that Davis in hindsight wish they had never done, market a device with the data support/upload included in the one off cost. So yes the WLIP's are paid for, up front, essentially no further costs for ever and if Davis try to reneg on that commitment then they are probably breaking a whole bunch of consumer laws?

So essentially Davis have to support any WLIP until the last one dies and WLIP's just don't do that. Maybe if Davis want to rid themselves of their own doing then they might have to compensate the users and/or open the WLIP IP access up instead of being locked to Davis servers.

Davis need to be very careful with this one.     

Offline catdon

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #15 on: April 03, 2020, 08:16:10 PM »
So if you have a pro plan you don't have to do this update? I assume the e mail just went out to those  who dont...
Don
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Online Mattk

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #16 on: April 03, 2020, 08:20:55 PM »
So if you have a pro plan you don't have to do this update? I assume the e mail just went out to those  who dont...

I don't believe that is the case, there should be no connection between the WLIP and the requirement for any sort of plan. That is unless this whole WLIP issue is a Davis manipulation to somehow have all the WLIP's updated for some obscure reason?

This whole WLIP issue and WeatherLink v2 has had a real bad smell about it re WLIP.

Offline johnd

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #17 on: April 04, 2020, 04:30:33 AM »
Rather than trying to impute all sorts of malign intentions to Davis, it may be helpful to summarise the origins of this WLIP issue AIUI:

Back in the mists of time when the original WLIP firmware was written, a particular coding approach to handling date formats was used. This worked absolutely fine and there was no reason to suspect any issue right up until 1st Jan 2020. But just after midnight on New Year's Day this year this approach broke, presumably because a short-form date was no longer recognised as belonging to the 21st century but was allocated to the 20th century instead, or something like that. This latent coding bug was fixed in firmware v1.15.

The way that WLIP normally handles archive data is that it uploads only the latest records once per hour, so with a 5min archive interval there would usually be 12 records to upload, 10min AI = 6 records etc. I think there is some exchange between the logger and the weatherlink.com servers just before the upload starts where the server is asked which timestamp the upload should start from and this would typically be just the last hour's data.

Unfortunately the WLIP date bug seems to have broken the handling of this request for the timestamp of the first new record and the result was that every WLIP started trying to upload its complete archive content each and EVERY HOUR. The result was a massive (ie 200-300x) increase in the total volume of WLIP archive data that the servers were required to handle. With such a huge increase in volumes the servers were unable to cope (and another side effect was that the console became unresponsive while the logger was trying to upload 2560 records to overloaded servers).

This is why Davis are so keen for all users to upgrade to the v1.15 firmware - the server load from non-updated WLIP loggers was unsustainable - and the need to actively encourage every WLIP user to update. But recognising that a few users have WLIP units at remote sites where updating the firmware may be tricky to do, Davis now seem to have provided one alternative which is to make a contribution to the considerable extra cost of provisioning extra server capacity to cope with non-updated WLIP loggers. And the simplest way of doing so is to purchase a Pro subscription. But for most users this really should not be necessary, you just have to do the firmware update. No-one is requiring WLIP users to buy a Pro plan, only those who refuse or for some reason cannot update their logger's firmware.

I know that some users like to use every opportunity to bash Davis and that's fine. But others might prefer to deal in facts.
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Sorry, but I don't usually have time to help with individual issues by email unless you are a Prodata customer. Please post your issue in the relevant forum section here & I will comment there if I have anything useful to add.

Online Mattk

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #18 on: April 04, 2020, 05:12:04 AM »
The simplest way to update most remote WLIP is for Davis to provide the means to do this remotely, this option does not exist

Offline johnd

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #19 on: April 04, 2020, 06:32:31 AM »
The simplest way to update most remote WLIP is for Davis to provide the means to do this remotely, this option does not exist

Not sure what you mean - there is obviously a remote IP address option on the updater. But maybe you mean that, for whatever reason, this isn't working for you or perhaps the remote IP logger doesn't have a known public IP address (eg maybe it's just a private IP address as typically used in eg a cellular network pool?). How difficult it is to engineer a workaround for the latter I don't know - perhaps feasible but would require significant work? There's also the possibility of a Catch-22, ie it might be possible to improve the ease of remote updating but this itself might require installing new firmware ](*,)

I suspect that Davis are also hoping that in the months that have elapsed since this issue first came to light that even users with remote loggers may have the opportunity to visit the sites and update the loggers directly if remote updates were not working.
« Last Edit: April 04, 2020, 06:39:25 AM by johnd »
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Sorry, but I don't usually have time to help with individual issues by email unless you are a Prodata customer. Please post your issue in the relevant forum section here & I will comment there if I have anything useful to add.

Offline galfert

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #20 on: April 04, 2020, 06:33:34 AM »
Johnd,
Great write-up. Perfect explanation.

I don't think there is a conspiracy to get people to upgrade to Pro plans. Upgrading to Pro plan should be a last choice option for everyone.
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Online Mattk

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #21 on: April 05, 2020, 12:33:41 AM »
The simplest way to update most remote WLIP is for Davis to provide the means to do this remotely, this option does not exist

Not sure what you mean - there is obviously a remote IP address option on the updater. But maybe you mean that, for whatever reason, this isn't working for you or perhaps the remote IP logger doesn't have a known public IP address (eg maybe it's just a private IP address as typically used in eg a cellular network pool?). How difficult it is to engineer a workaround for the latter I don't know - perhaps feasible but would require significant work? There's also the possibility of a Catch-22, ie it might be possible to improve the ease of remote updating but this itself might require installing new firmware ](*,)

I suspect that Davis are also hoping that in the months that have elapsed since this issue first came to light that even users with remote loggers may have the opportunity to visit the sites and update the loggers directly if remote updates were not working.

Well I mean I did a lot of prior testing with this 1.15 update due to having quite remote systems but the 1.15 update would simply not find remote loggers, and yes all this stuff is DNS with public IP's but there is just something different with the update Remote IP Address of the firmware updater, not that the firmware updater is IP only as compared to say WeatherLink which also accepts a URL

Stuff like this can be made a lot more difficult when there are no specifics and only having a IP space which can't handle ports? Dunno but unless one knows what the firmware update is trying to do or maybe looking for then it becomes rather obscure and useless

Offline johnd

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #22 on: April 05, 2020, 04:07:49 AM »
Well I mean I did a lot of prior testing with this 1.15 update due to having quite remote systems but the 1.15 update would simply not find remote loggers, and yes all this stuff is DNS with public IP's but there is just something different with the update Remote IP Address of the firmware updater, not that the firmware updater is IP only as compared to say WeatherLink which also accepts a URL

OK, well that seems fair enough. Did any of your attempted remote updates work? Can you see the WLIP web interface remotely? (Not actually sure this would work remotely anyway, maybe for security reasons, but it might?) Can you download direct from the logger remotely?

What do Davis support have to say?
Prodata Weather Systems
Prodata's FAQ/support site for Davis stations
Includes many details on 6313 Weatherlink console.
UK Davis Premier Dealer - All Davis stations, accessories and spares
Cambridge UK

Sorry, but I don't usually have time to help with individual issues by email unless you are a Prodata customer. Please post your issue in the relevant forum section here & I will comment there if I have anything useful to add.

Offline casacota

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #23 on: April 05, 2020, 04:37:59 AM »
Johnd,
Great write-up. Perfect explanation.

I don't think there is a conspiracy to get people to upgrade to Pro plans. Upgrading to Pro plan should be a last choice option for everyone.

Well, having up to 8 Davis stations at remote locations, almost all at mountain towns inhabited by old people without computer, now threatened by covid-19 and we all confined for months (and with high fines if we leave the houses or drive a car), a time limit from few days IS a conspiracy.

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Re: Davis WeatherLinkIP - Important Information
« Reply #24 on: April 05, 2020, 05:15:40 AM »
Well I mean I did a lot of prior testing with this 1.15 update due to having quite remote systems but the 1.15 update would simply not find remote loggers, and yes all this stuff is DNS with public IP's but there is just something different with the update Remote IP Address of the firmware updater, not that the firmware updater is IP only as compared to say WeatherLink which also accepts a URL

OK, well that seems fair enough. Did any of your attempted remote updates work? Can you see the WLIP web interface remotely? (Not actually sure this would work remotely anyway, maybe for security reasons, but it might?) Can you download direct from the logger remotely?

What do Davis support have to say?

I could quite easily duplicate the systems with the exact same hardware, logically it should work but just appeared to be missing something. No problems downloading directly from the loggers remotely but I don't believe port 22222 is involved with firmware updates? Could be wrong but without the necessary info makes things a little difficult. 

 

anything