Cumulus Support

Good Morning Steve,

I seem to found a possible bug in the Pressure within Cumulus. I have found that, If I restart Cumulus, My pressure reading from the restart point onwards, drops by about 10hpa? Yet, If I restart Cumulus again, It returns to normal?

Another problem I have found is, The realtime file will update for about 2/3 days and then it will suddenly stop updating, until I restart Cumulus?

I have attached a screenshot, showing the sudden drop in Pressure, I restarted Cumulus this morning.

Regards

Jason

I'm guessing that the drop is equivalent to the difference between station and sea-level pressure (absolute and relative) at your location. This FAQ entry has the most likely explanation: http://sandaysoft.com/faq#faq_21

Regarding the realtime upload - if you turn on the ftp logging, that will hopefully show what the problem is when it happens. The file might get a bit large over a couple of days, though!

Thanks Steve. I have done both those now. Will get back to you in a few days.

Oh yes, Has your Fine Offset Station Arrived?

Regards

Jason

6719jason wrote:Oh yes, Has your Fine Offset Station Arrived?

Not yet

It was last tracked in Aberdeen at 0800 yesterday; I was hoping it would arrive today with the island haulier, but it doesn't look like it will now.

I don't know if this is related to your realtime problem
But I have noticed that Cumulus gives up sending Realtime file if there has been some FTP connect timeouts.
Html files OK. Manual Web Updates same problem. This seems to be a daily affair as the ISP gets busy around 5:00pm
Not noticed it on earlier releases.
Only way to get realtime to work again is to restart Cumulus.
A bit of a worry as heading to Scotland for 3 Weeks in August.
Thanks
Wayne

wheels wrote:But I have noticed that Cumulus gives up sending Realtime file if there has been some FTP connect timeouts.
Html files OK. Manual Web Updates same problem. This seems to be a daily affair as the ISP gets busy around 5:00pm
Not noticed it on earlier releases.

I put in some improvements to ftp connect timeout handling in 1.8.4 at the end of last year, but I don't recall having done any changes in that area since. I have problems with my ftp connections from time to time and Cumulus never fails to recover. But of course there are many different ftp servers out there and many different ways for them to fail, so it's quite possible there's a failure condition it doesn't cope with. The ftp logs may well show something.

thanks Steve
I have enabled FTP Logging and will wait and see what happens
Wayne

Hi Steve,
Looking at the realtimeftplog.txt Cumulus seems to have 3 attempts at sending the realtime file then aborts for good.
Should I try to reinstall Cumulus?
Html files OK Thanks
wayne

It looks like the ftp server just stops responding. How long had Cumulus been running?

Reinstalling is unlikely to fix anything. You could perhaps try increasing the frequency of the realtime updates; you have it set to 60 seconds - which is quite reasonable given that the station only updates every 48 seconds, but I wonder if the server is operating some sort of timeout. You could try 30 seconds, maybe. Could you also turn on the debug log, there may be a bit more info from Cumulus itself; the ftp log can be a bit cryptic.

Yes the server had gone down in fact for 2 hrs this time. Realtime ftp running fine until server goes down.
The problem is when the server comes back Cumulus has already given up on realtime ftp.
I shall turn on debug log.
thanks
Wayne

I've tried to reproduce this problem running an ftp server locally, and killing it in various ways. Cumulus always detects that the connection has gone, and keeps trying to reconnect until the server comes back, at which point it reconnects and carries on uploading the realtime.txt file.

So your ftp server must be failing in some strange way that doesn't kill the connection but at the same time doesn't allow it to continue to be used. I'll have to have a think and see if there's anything I can do that might help.

Thanks Steve for your help
My ISP has not failed since so I hope the problem has gone with it.
I have kept the debuglog running if it happens again.
There's probably nothing we can do until it happens.
Thanks
Wayne

I'm thinking maybe an optional 'disconnect every N realtime upload attempts' feature might do the trick. So in your case, you set it to 60, say, and it disconnects every hour. On the next upload it will attempt to reconnect. It might help, might not, might cause other problems but probably worth trying. I'll look into it.

I've put an option in the latest beta to periodically disconnect the realtime ftp connection, the theory being that it will then not get stuck if the server dies, and will keep trying to reconnect.

http://www.nybbles.co.uk/downloads/beta ... sSetup.exe

To use it, edit cumulus.ini, and in the [station] section add a line:

RTdisconnectcount=60

The '60' is an example; it represents the number of realtime ftp uploads between disconnections - so 60 would give an hour in your case.

Thanks I shall give it a go
Wayne