Empty inifile

[HansR]

@Mark: Last night I had a problem connecting to the website for the inifile transfer. I found out this morning at 6h54, shutdown CMX and restarted after checking the logfile. No serious messages, apart that it could not login. Weird, never occurred before, but it may be just that: weird. Than at 9h00 there was an automatic shutdown, backup and startup. Daily routine to safeguard the data to the NAS.

But then: I found out 45 minutes later that my inifile had nothing in it (0 bytes). This is the second time this happened to me. I found out that the backup of 9 am it was already empty. While in the daily directory and the backup of the restart after the 6u54 event had a good one. So, saved I guess. But still, an empty inifile.

The logfiles themselves contain no relevant messages.

I have been thinking this over and it may have to do with my CumulusUtils reading the inifile (never writing to it). If that happens the same time CMX is shutting down it may cause the problem. It may be. Just saying. Note that Phil23 - if I remember well - also had this issue which is why the ini is now part of the backup. Which is a good action.

Question is what preventive action do/can we need to take?
I think I will make a copy of the inifile to prevent anything from happening and work from there.
Happy with that?

[Phil23]

My INI file issues were a bit varied.

On occasions I lost the whole file; other occasions it seemed to be Extra Webfiles, NOAA entries & settings for other sites upload to.

Utils was in my mind; but there was never anything to point to that.

My day end script does a fair bit;
Merges two dayfiles,
Runs Cumulus Utils,
Processes some file changes,
then calls WinScp to upload the above results.

But,
Some of my INI issues have occurred at scheduled shutdowns that did not involve Utils; hence I could rule it out.

Other thing that needs to be noted about my Weather PC is that it has High CPU utilization at times.

This is attributed to the iSpy video software that runs with 2 camera feeds.
It Uploads the images every minute,
but also takes frames every 10 seconds to build a time lapse MPG4 video from each channel.
Think that's the CPU intensive bit.
Files have a 30 minute time span & completed on the hour & half hour marks, so CPU & disk usage could be highest at these points.

My insurance in now copying the whole lot to one of my NAS's; leads to me retaining a full collection of the backup files MX creates.

Phil.

[HansR]

Yes, copying to the NAS is an extra insurance which I do too (daily, the whole CMX directory structure, takes less that a minute).
Anyway, apparently we stumble upon the same inifile problem which fortunately can be resolved easily, because the ini is now saved in the backup directory with the other files, but it should not happen. The first time it took me a day to find out, now I detected it in half an hour. I changed CumulusUtils to use a copy of the inifile, so to exclude that as a cause. Let's keep our eyes open, it's a nuisance.
Hans

[mcrossley]

Hans, do you want to send me a snippet of code that you use to read the file. The issue may be there.

[HansR]

@Mark: by PM