Cumulus Support

Finally, got around to upgrading my long time running WinXP box that I used for Weather processing. It has been a real trouper and was a used computer before I repurposed it to the weather workstation role many years ago.

Other than having to reboot it occasionally when it lost its way, it has been pretty much solid though a bit slow.

My configuration here is using a Vanatage Pro2+ with serial logged that is connected to with VirtualVP and then has 3 weather processing systems sharing the data off of virtual com ports.

• Cumulus
• Weather Display
• A custom weather project that I wrote

The entire workstation is headless, no monitor, keyboard or mouse and I connect to it using RealVNC from other computes or my phone to check on, adjust when necessary etc.. I rarely spend very much time on this though. I just works.

So, the replacement is actually a refurbished computer since I was trying to keep the cost down but I did a lot of checking before making the purchase.

• Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p
• Intel i5 CPU
• 8GB Ram
• 500GB (still thinking of switching to a spare SSD drive I have)
• Win7 Pro 64bit
• RS232 port (which my station uses still)
• 4 USB3
• 4 USB2
• 3 Internal PCI Slots (GeForce will go into one of those)
• VGA and Display port

Basically the capabilities to run the existing software and connections but a faster more powerful box using Win7Pro.

Note that I decided that since this is going to be headless, using Win8 or even Win10 would not be a good choice. I need to know when and control updates on this box since it is headless. Having an update without notice and a non-responsive workstation when I don't have a monitor on it to see what the issue is causes lots of time problems.

System has been fully up and running for about 48 hours now though I just fixed the cabled network connection this morning.

It is running:

• Win7Pro registered and fully patched (GWX to prevent OS upgrades)
• StartWatch
• VirtualVP w/VSPE drivers, using 3 virtual ports to split the data from the weather logger
• WD with the version and data from the old box. No issues that I have seen so far
• GRLevel3, now using png rather than jpg which are a bit sharper looking
• SyncBackSE to move some data to the web server and archives of data.
• and I am testing AOMEI Backupper for workstation backups (image, emergency boot media and offline storage)

It is very fast compared to the previous machine. Remote access from other workstaitons and even my phone are pretty much instant and with good response.

Moving the existing various packages from the old workstation to the new one was pretty painless. The only real problem I had was with VirtualVP and virtual com port drivers. I ended up using Eterlogic VSPE drivers for that.

Now that I have a newer platform to work with, I might take some time to give the Cumulus MX version a shot. Really didn't have the time and was worried about overloading the older box in the past so never bothered.

TNETWeather wrote:Now that I have a newer platform to work with, I might take some time to give the Cumulus MX version a shot. Really didn't have the time and was worried about overloading the older box in the past so never bothered.

You should, the resource requirement is very low - I run it on an original (read v. slow and not much memory!) Raspberry Pi model B along with an NGINX and PHP webserver (though not my weather site).

Windows 7 is probably a good choice for a headless station - especially when on a private network behind a firewall etc.