Currently, the top 3 weather stations are down, Beeman, East Gloucester, and O’Maley. As some people may know I have a new job in Franklin, MA, so I am not able to take care of them. If someone would be up to this task please let me know. These machines probably just need to be rebooted or something silly like that, but unfortunately it is serious enough that I can’t get to it over my connection here.
This is the first time I’ve really played with css, and it sucks. But, now the DanChase.net homepage has big pictures! I went into each machine and changed the variables I talked about awhile ago http://danchase.net/blog/?p=93 then went and changed around the html and css to accommodate it. It seems that css is great when you know what your doing, and your starting from scratch maybe, or at least something you understand. Either way, let me know if I bungled something in the process!
Also, I added the ‘refresh’ metatag to the homepage, so it refreshes every 100 seconds or so if you just sit on it, and the old page can be found at http://danchase.net/oldweb/
This deserves it’s own post: I’m a glutton for punishment and have my Debian boxes automatically update because I don’t feel like approving every patch for 6 boxes. This means wviewmgmt gets messed up frequently since I only look at it every few months anyway. For Debian people, here is one easy line to fix it:
apt-get -y purge libapache2-mod-php5;apt-get -y install libapache2-mod-php5;/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
I set this in webmin as a custom command so it’s on it’s own little button, as well as a simple wview restart command /etc/init.d/wview restart (Have I said before how much webmin rules? I don’t know how I could live without it, thanks Grant!)
It’s been quite annoying that people could only see the NOAA summaries from the local IP, inside the Gloucester network, since my ftp rule was messed up, but no longer! Thanks to http://saratoga-weather.org I found this great image. The tricky part is wview complains about just putting NOAA/*.txt but it works anyway, woot!
To access this data from DanChase.net, click on any one of the schools, like Beeman which takes you to here -> http://danchase.net/bweather/index.html than scroll all the way to the bottom. Try clicking ‘monthly report’ and viola! A summary for the current month, and you can get this for any school and any month since I installed them last spring. Enjoy!
East Gloucester is the only station giving me trouble, but not too much trouble. I think it is suffering from a bad batteries, let this be a lesson to you, well two lessons A- if a deal on eBay is too good to be true it probably is, and B- don’t buy batteries on eBay.
Second, I found Windsync crashed/closed when I logged in this morning. It looks as if with the cold weather the signal strength is going down, and the program loses sync and crashes. I think moving the computer will make it happy, maybe to the 3rd (2nd? I can never tell at that school) floor will help.
Also, if any robots are reading this, Stop The Spam please! It’s getting annoying.
Hurricane Sandy came and went, and unfortunately 3 of the stations were down for it. The power supply in the West Parish computer died, so I swapped in a new one. I had to quickly relearn a Linux lesson about networking, where when you change a network card (even if it is part of the whole computer you are replacing) you need to correct the /etc/network/interfaces file and change everything to the new network card name. The old one was eth2 and the new one is eth4. I found that out by doing ifconfig -a. As soon as I did that and a quick restart the machine was up and uploading and happy. I also moved it to the room next door so hopefully it will receive better reception, since it is directly underneath the ISS. I also turned on the repeater function, so the room where it was will get better signal, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that one before!
The Windspire data for (Most of) August and September has been uploaded to a Google Fusion table. It’s not live, I just dumped it there: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1lQKGza3tacUmkjxWLbI93so1axCIQ1nHrBxv30U It’s a really big file so far, (2.6 Million lines!) so we’ll see if Google can digest it.
In other news, O’Maley is recording data, but there is nothing there, which usually means the ISS is down. It’s been cloudy almost all week, so I’m guessing that the battery is low / dead so it needs sun to charge it. This stinks because I thought I changed it a couple of months ago.
Lastly, I received a great ‘kudos’ on the Gloucester Public Schools staff email, it’s a nice little ego boost, thanks all!
At approximately 20:00 yesterday it stopped recording data. A quick reboot solved that even though I looked around first to make sure nothing was wrong first, instead of the classic Windows trick of ‘reboot and ask questions later’. I also noticed it hasn’t been updating the rxcheck.png file since April, I have to get to the bottom of that, eventually. 
After the repairs West Parish is still cutting out. Looking at the reception quality, it seems that possibly the monitor is too far away, which seems odd since it’s in the room underneath the ISS, but it was placed all the way to the edge of the room towards the windows.
Unfortunately today is moving day, so I won’t have time to physically play with it for awhile.
I am also a bit worried about the O’Maley computer, since I plugged both the Windspire and the Wx machine into a crappy netgear switch that seems to have gone south this week. I went in and reset it, but I won’t be able to do that from 80 miles away. We’ll see what happens.
Ok, the Sizmograph is close to Beeman, not Plum, and it is actually in the CAARA ham shack, but I did help install it today. The data is at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/netquakes/station/MAGLO_NE_01/
Plum has been acting weird all day and just popped back to life a little while ago. It has been giving intermittent signals yesterday, and today it wasn’t putting out anything until an hour ago. The intermittent-nees could be because they are putting up a new water tower next to the school, but for it to go out all day is odd, unless they were running some heavy equipment, it did turn back on at 5ish. West Parish has also has hiccups. Maybe they will both even out soon.