Author Topic: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website  (Read 6120 times)

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Offline saratogaWX

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weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« on: November 27, 2006, 03:43:06 PM »
For a while now, I've had the occasional strange "Error 500 - internal server error' when browsing my homepage, and couldn't figure out what was causing it.

Today it happened again and I isolated it to the rss-advisory-test-c.php (RSS Advisory script) that was accessing

http://www.weather.gov/alerts/wwarssget.php?zone=CAZ513

Instead of returning XML, it was waiting about 60 seconds and returning a page that said:

Quote
Information Alert

Status : 504 Gateway Time-Out

Description : Lost connection to origin server.

in HTML, not XML.  Looks like some reverse proxy for weather.gov was having a problem.

Now to figure out a long-term solution for it.

Ken
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis VP1+ FARS, Blitzortung RED, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteobridge
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Offline SLOweather

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #1 on: November 27, 2006, 04:14:00 PM »
I believe feed2js caches the RSS content on the server, and then feeds the RSS content from there. I have my feed2js set to 5 minute updates, where the stock setting is an hour.

If you don't want to use feed2js directly, maybe you can read the cache with PHP.

Lemmeno if you want to explore my installation.

Offline Harryca

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #2 on: December 05, 2006, 12:34:32 AM »
It looks like weather.gov has been having a lot of problems lately.  I have several feeds set up on my site using CaRP and my site will hang up for awhile and then get the following message in some of the feeds.  I get those kinds of errors once in awhile but, tonight has been especially bad.

[CaRP] XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 10 - This appears to be an HTML webpage, not a feed.

I am also using feed2js on another web page and it is having similar problems trying to read the feeds.

Offline capeweather

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #3 on: December 05, 2006, 01:21:45 AM »
I noticed the same thing. We are having problems on the east coast to so for now I took it down.  :( I'll check on it tomorrow. Good thing there are no weather warnings in SWFla right now.

Chris
Cape Coral, Florida
Website: http://www.capeweather.com
Website: http://www.fortmyersweather.net

Offline saratogaWX

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #4 on: December 05, 2006, 01:36:35 AM »
Yes, it happened today again.. one server (a reverse proxy probably) was unable to connect.

I'm going to rewrite part of the rss-advisory.php script to handle this specific problem and post "NOAA advisorys are temporarily unavailable." as the return message.

Ken
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis VP1+ FARS, Blitzortung RED, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteobridge
Free weather PHP scripts/website templates - update notifications on Twitter saratogaWXPHP

Offline saratogaWX

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #5 on: December 05, 2006, 02:36:40 AM »
Now is seems that there is no DNS for 'www.weather.gov'

Quote
12/04/06 23:27:27 dns www.weather.gov
No DNS for this address
(host doesn't exist)

12/04/06 23:31:32 whois weather.gov
.gov is a domain of USA Federal Government

whois -h whois.nic.gov weather.gov ...
% DOTGOV WHOIS Server ready

Domain Name: weather.gov

Status: Active

12/04/06 23:36:01 dig weather.gov @ 68.87.78.130
Dig weather.gov@68.87.78.130 ...
Non-authoritative answer
Recursive queries supported by this server
Nameserver has a problem and can't talk right now



Hmmmm

Houston, we have a problem...

Ken
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis VP1+ FARS, Blitzortung RED, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteobridge
Free weather PHP scripts/website templates - update notifications on Twitter saratogaWXPHP

Offline Harryca

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #6 on: December 05, 2006, 03:12:13 AM »
Well it looks like the problem just cleared up, for the moment anyway.  Even going to their alerts page to look at the feed was taking forever.  It was sure acting crazy.  If I didn't get an error on one feed, it would be another or just get a blank display with no error.  I hope they fixed whatever was ailing their system.

Offline saratogaWX

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #7 on: December 05, 2006, 03:15:49 AM »
Yes, it is resolving now:
Quote
12/05/06 00:13:34 dig www.weather.gov @ 68.87.78.130
Dig www.weather.gov@68.87.78.130 ...
Non-authoritative answer
Recursive queries supported by this server
 Query for www.weather.gov type=255 class=1
  www.weather.gov CNAME (Canonical Name) prpx.service.mirror-image.net

12/05/06 00:14:37 dig prpx.service.mirror-image.net @ 68.87.78.130
Dig prpx.service.mirror-image.net@68.87.78.130 ...
Non-authoritative answer
Recursive queries supported by this server
 Query for prpx.service.mirror-image.net type=255 class=1
  prpx.service.mirror-image.net A (Address) 65.216.72.120


Maybe the're moving servers and just screwed up the DNS propagation.

Ken
Ken True/Saratoga, CA, USA main site: saratoga-weather.org
Davis VP1+ FARS, Blitzortung RED, GRLevel3, WD, WL, VWS, Cumulus, Meteobridge
Free weather PHP scripts/website templates - update notifications on Twitter saratogaWXPHP

Offline Harryca

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #8 on: December 05, 2006, 03:29:28 AM »
And probably getting itself all confused in the process.  At least my page isin't getting hung up and feeds whacked at the moment.

And BTW, have noticed that some of the item descriptions in the feeds are getting cutoff or truncated?  I noticed it a few days ago and sent them email asking if that was the way it was supposed to be or if they had a problem.  I got a response back from the Internet Projects Specialist saying it was an "unplanned change" and would look into it but, it doesn't look like they fixed it yet

Offline weatheroz

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Re: weather.gov RSS feeds erratic .. can delay your website
« Reply #9 on: December 05, 2006, 04:12:16 AM »
Quote from: "kenmtrue"
Now is seems that there is no DNS for 'www.weather.gov'



Here's a looking glass site that you might find handy for future reference, as it's the one I use here.

http://looking-glass.optus.net.au/

Whilst it is in Australia, it might give you an alternative to try if your normal ones aren't working. :)
Brendan,
vk4blp
IRLP 6857 Echolink 672767


 

anything