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Site going down.

Talk about anything that doesn't fit elsewhere - PLEASE don't put Cumulus queries in here!
sfws
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Re: Site going down.

Post by sfws »

RayProudfoot wrote:Pleased to report I have an entry in dayfile.txt for the 17th. The 16th is missing so I'll have to add that manually. I'll use the data from WU. It was an unremarkable day weather-wise so no other data needs editing.
Ray, I see you now have added a line for 16th on http://www.cheadlehulmeweather.co.uk/dayfile.txt, so you have everything sorted for now.

I still have a bit of curiosity as to what went wrong, so I have a question or two for you. Cumulus does a daily backup towards the end of its rollover process, whilst it updates dayfile.txt near the start of the quick rollover process. Does your Cumulus/backup/daily/201810170000xx folder exist (suggesting rollover was ok) or is it missing (indicating a failure to complete rollover)? If the folder exists, does the dayfile.txt file in that daily backup for the midnight between 16th and 17th include a line for 16 Oct (suggesting the main dayfile.txt in the data folder had the line, then somehow reverted to as it was before rollover)?
RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

sfws wrote:Ray, I see you now have added a line for 16th on http://www.cheadlehulmeweather.co.uk/dayfile.txt, so you have everything sorted for now.

I still have a bit of curiosity as to what went wrong, so I have a question or two for you. Cumulus does a daily backup towards the end of its rollover process, whilst it updates dayfile.txt near the start of the quick rollover process. Does your Cumulus/backup/daily/201810170000xx folder exist (suggesting rollover was ok) or is it missing (indicating a failure to complete rollover)? If the folder exists, does the dayfile.txt file in that daily backup for the midnight between 16th and 17th include a line for 16 Oct (suggesting the main dayfile.txt in the data folder had the line, then somehow reverted to as it was before rollover)?
Hi sfws, the folder exists as does dayfile.txt but it does not contain an entry for the 16th. I did close Cumulus around 23:30 that evening and immediately restarted it so can't think why the entry wouldn't be generated.

As an aside. I spent around an hour manually adding the entry for the 16th from WU data and had to guess some fields which are unique to Cumulus. But something went wrong when I substituted mine for the original as none of the NOAA reports showed any data.

I then spotted the Build Missing Entries option in the DayFile.editor and pressed it. With nearly 10 years of logs to go through I wan't sure how long it would take as I've never used that option before.

Amazingly it found the entry for the 16th was missing and read the relevant log file to generate the entry. Fantastic! The NOAA reports then displayed correctly as did everything else. Lesson learned. Use that option whenever you need to generate a missing day or days in dayfile.txt.

I see Steve has reported there is still malware on the system but with the expertise of people like Steve and freddie it can hopefully be eradicated. What is the attitude of the server providers like? As the site is still running perhaps they realise you are doing all you can to eliminate the problems. No further threats to shut it down?

Steve, I hope you will take some time to consider your hosting services. I did look at a site recommended in another thread and the charges were £12.50 per month for the minimum level of service. Ouch! I'm more than happy to pay more than what I currently do. I know this malware has been a pain especially with you not able to gain access due to your holiday.

But there are several people on the forum with the skills able to assist so maybe once the malware has been killed off you'll reconsider asking us to find alternative hosts. I'd much rather give you money that a non-descript company.

And finally, I hope you enjoyed your meal last night. First and last time or would you do it again?
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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archae86
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Location: Albuquerque, NM, USA

Moved my website to A2

Post by archae86 »

This morning I completed the task of moving my Cumulus-generated website from being hosted by Steve Loft to being hosted by A2 hosting.

I stumbled over a few things, and have one serious remaining unsolved problem--but that problem does not relate to weather. I intend to update this post with comments on my personal stumbling points, in case they might help another.
My cumulus generated weather site is at http://pastoll.info/weather
RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

I’m contacting a web hosting company tomorrow and hope the transfer will be seamless.

One question. When I used FileZilla and right-clicked in the top level folder and chose download all the files were transferred. But where to? I did it on a laptop that doesn’t have Cumulus installed but can’t find them anywhere.

@archae86, look forward to any tips you have.
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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freddie
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Re: Site going down.

Post by freddie »

RayProudfoot wrote:One question. When I used FileZilla and right-clicked in the top level folder and chose download all the files were transferred. But where to? I did it on a laptop that doesn’t have Cumulus installed but can’t find them anywhere.
If you open FileZilla again you should be presented with two panels with "explorer" windows. On the left is the "local" window, which is listing the files and folders on your computer. This should still be set to where FileZilla downloaded your files, so you should be able to see where they are.
Freddie
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RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

Thanks freddie. I've found them. My local copy of Cumulus is on another laptop just for convenience. They were in a folder named in this path:-

C:\Cumulus1\web\_\www

where www is the top level on the server.

So my question is when the time comes to transfer the files from Steve's server to the new one do I just copy the contents of www to the top level of the new server? If the new server's top level folder is named www then it's seamless. If it's another name then I copy everything within www but not www itself.
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

Would I be correct in thinking the following actions should be taken to switch Cumulus from Steve’s server to the new one?

1) Close Cumulus ensuring an upload is not taking place. Create a folder on your PC to hold the downloaded data. C:\Cumtemp is a suitable name.

2) Login to Steve’s server using FileZilla. On the left window select the location created above where the files will be downloaded to.

3) On the right window in FileZilla select the top level folder, right-click it and select Download. The transfer begins.

4) Once the transfer is completed close FileZilla.

5) Open FileZilla and enter the login info for the new host.

6) Locate the top level folder of the downloaded data in the left window and drag and drop it to the top level on the right window. All the Cumulus files will now be transferred.

7) Once the upload is complete launch your preferred browser and go to your website.

You should be able to navigate around your webpages. If everything looks okay then...

8) Start Cumulus, go into Settings and change the IP address, port, password etc. and try a manual upload. If it works then you’re done.

I’m doing this primarily for myself as I’ve never done it before. If I’ve missed anything or got anything wrong please let me know. Hopefully it might be helpful to others in the same boat.

PS. One extra action. Before all this you need to open CPanel and enter the new IP address and any other relevant info. That is one area I know least about and hopefully I won’t mess anything up.
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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archae86
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Location: Albuquerque, NM, USA

stumbles in changing hosting

Post by archae86 »

This post is no substitute for the considerable support materials available. In particular, Steve's help and FAQ have good material on setting up a new web site. Moving from one hosting service to another is a special case of setting up a new site. This post concentrates on things that actually caused me some trouble, and adds a few things I thought of on my own that might be helpful to a fellow neophyte. Any pro who wishes to correct or extend my remarks would earn my gratitude.

CHOOSING A HOSTING SERVICE

One could spend a lifetime on this one. I briefly looked in to the services suggested in this thread on this site hosting thread, then decided just to go with the A2 Hosting bottom end offering, accepting the 3-year prepayment condition to get the cost down a little below $50/year, though renewal after three years is promised to be twice as expensive. You can doubtless get good service for less.

I was surprised at how small my file footprint on the server to support (standard, not MX) Cumulus proved to be. 68 files totalled under one Megabyte. The traffic is not so tiny, however. I update on a 5 minute interval, and consume about 5 Gigabytes/month of uplink traffic from my PC to the server. I am very confident that my viewers consume very, very much less.

HOSTING SERVICE INITIAL INTERACTIONS

During signup A2 hosting wanted to know what domain I'd be using and how I'd come by it. I selected the option for "I already own a domain, and I want to redirect it to point to you, and I don't want to give you management of the domain".

A2 Hosting sent me an e-mail within moments of accepting my payment, with details in the email or at the click of a link for the crucial things I needed. Chief among these were a URL which would point at my new site even while my domain was not yet retargeted, FTP transfer credentials, and the name servers necessary to use to get my domain to point to my hew hosting site.

MOVING MY STUFF FROM STEVE'S HOST TO THE NEW ONE

My first stumbling block here was that my long-time FTP application, FireFTP, appears to have not made it to modern editions of Mozilla FireFox. This was worse than it sounded, as I'd lazily relied on FireFTP to remember my credentials. I chose FileZilla for FTP. I found that the configuration file Cumulus.ini on my PC had my credentials in the first five lines of the FTP Site section.

With that taken care of, I created a directory on my PC (Backups), and selected it in the left pane of FileZilla, and selected the top directory of the weather containing stuff on Steve's server, right clicked and selected download.

It was slightly trickier to get the FTP credentials into Filezilla to move stuff to the right place on my new A2 hosting site. The A2 hosting message did not quite use the same terminology. The only port they mentioned was the SSH port, but that is wrong for FileZilla FTP use. Filezilla worked with Port 21, as is usual for FTP. The really sticky point was what Steve calls "directory". I had to wander around the A2 hosting documentation a while before bumping into a mention that only files and directories under the (pre-existing) directory called public_html would be accessible to visitors on their web browsers. I guessed that this meant I should arrange the material I was moving from Steve's server to A2 so that public_html occupied the position that www occupied at Steve. This was true.

My test process was to copy the full Cumulus site tree onto the new server, then use the "no domain move required" URL A2 provided to check that I could actually see my saved Cumulus web pages (complete with unchanging, and thus out-of-date last update notations).

POINTING MY DOMAIN TO THE NEW PLACE

My domain (pastoll.info) I rent for a year at a time from my domain registrar, which happens to be Google's domain service. Other registrars organize their user interface differently, but some common issues may apply. When logged in to the Google domain service I needed to get to the section on DNS issues. The only thing I needed to do there was to indicate that I'd be specifying nameservers, not using the Google defaults, and actually entering the four nameservers that A2 supplied. It was also crucial that I click the "Save" button. That got me an alarming highlighted warning message that in departing from the Google nameserver standard, I was losing other Google-controlled stuff on that page. That turned out to be what I wanted.

My stumbling block on this page was that I expected to need to supply an actual address (either IP or text string) for my new server location. I had needed to do so to use the immediate previous Steve server, but that one had me using default nameservers. With specification of A2 hosting nameservers, Google was uninterested in any kind of address. (good thing, as the field would not take a text one, A2 had not supplied a numeric one, and I did not trust that the numeric one I discovered by ping would be stable over time).

WAITING FOR PROPAGATION

All standard instructions tell you to expect a significant delay (up to a day) before a change to the place your domain points to takes effect (it literally propagates round the world, I guess). I monitored this process by keeping open a command line window, and doing a new ping to my domain about every five minutes
ping -n 1 pastoll.info
I also had open a browser window to a page of my weather site, using my domain address. As I had not updated the FTP section of Cumulus yet, the site getting updates was the old one. So when I refreshed the browser window every five minutes, if the page updated time at lower right was fresh, my browser was still getting data from the old place. Having saved the nameserver change at 7:01 a.m., I saw both methods indicating it had taken effect a little before 7:56 a.m.

POINTING CUMULUS TO UPDATE THE NEW PLACE

With my domain addressing updated, any user looking at my site was now seeing stale data, so it was time to update the Internet configuration page for Cumulus, and I hit my last stumbling block. I knew perfectly well that I needed to type "public_html" into the directory window, but at the moment of typing my brain faded and I instead typed public_ftp. On hitting update, I got normal looking progress indications from Cumulus (pop-up box, announcement of logging in to the new host, changing directory, and sending various types of files). Nothing useful accomplished, however. Once I fixed the faulty entry in the Cumulus Sites/Options|Web Site section, hitting the web update item gave very similar popup window messages, but this time the web site I saw in my browser was updated.

TOUCHUP

A2 had pre-positioned an index.php file, which seems the way they have things configured to have taken precedence over my Steve-related index.htm file. Fortunately they populated it with text suggesting that a new owner would want to delete it, which I did.

ALL DONE BUT THE CLEANUP, AND MY NON-CUMULUS PROBLEM

I've not yet removed any files from Steve's server, and plan not to for a few days, just in case... My remaining problem is that some non weather related files I've moved onto the new server don't show up to a browser the way they did on Steve's. I suspect this is some site configuration option, possibly related to the lack of an index.* file in the directories of interest. But I need to find a way around it, but maybe not today.
My cumulus generated weather site is at http://pastoll.info/weather
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beteljuice
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Re: New hosts

Post by beteljuice »

IMPORTANT !

Guys - different hosts may have a different names for the root of the 'normal' web stuff !

It may be public_html, or www , or ....

Ensure you copy the contents of ONLY the 'webspace' folder (and below) , and in the same manner only UPLOAD to the new 'webspace' folder !
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......................Imagine, what you will KNOW tomorrow !
RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

@archae86, thanks for the write-up on your experience. Hopefully I won't have as many problems but who knows.

@beteljuice, thanks. I'm reasonably Windows literate in regard to folders and structure so if I take care I should be okay.

Finally, I hope this forum stays available for as long as it takes for all Steve's customers to get settled with their new web providers. Is anyone offering to host the forum and / or the Wiki? Seems such a shame that so much info could be lost.
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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ConligWX
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Re: Site going down.

Post by ConligWX »

RayProudfoot wrote:Is anyone offering to host the forum and / or the Wiki? Seems such a shame that so much info could be lost.
afaik yes, what time frame these will be available maybe questionable. you can always goto wxforums and chat there.
Regards Simon

https://www.conligwx.org - @conligwx
Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus with Daytime FARS • WeatherLink Live • Davis AirLink • PurpleAir •

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RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

Toxic17 wrote:
RayProudfoot wrote:Is anyone offering to host the forum and / or the Wiki? Seems such a shame that so much info could be lost.
afaik yes, what time frame these will be available maybe questionable. you can always goto wxforums and chat there.
That's good to hear, thanks Simon. I am subscribed to WX Forum so will move my discussions there when the time comes.
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

I've just written to HostPresto - https://hostpresto.com/ - who get very good reviews on Trustpilot giving my requirements including the need for FTP and running PHP scripts.

I've just downloaded the entire contents of my data and it comes to 15Mb. And that's over nearly 10 years so you can see my requirements are very modest.

I hope to hear from them soon.
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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RayProudfoot
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Re: Site going down.

Post by RayProudfoot »

Somewhat amazingly I have signed up to a new provider, copied my files there, changed the IP address for my domain name, updated the settings in Cumulus and the first upload worked seamlessly! :D

I'm with HostPresto who are based in the UK and my initial impressions are very favourable. One thing I now have which I didn't with Steve (and no criticism is intended by that) is a cPanel where I can monitor visits, bandwidth and other helpful info.

The process is relatively painless and I was getting myself into a lather worrying how difficult it would be. All done in 3 hours! :D
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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dc1500
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Re: Site going down.

Post by dc1500 »

Hi Ray, that provider looks pretty good compared to what I've seen so far. Did you go for the starter at £24?
Dave
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