data.vatsim.net down

[Nick Johnston]

Do we have a contact for whoever's managing the data.vatsim.net server?

 

It looks like it's been down for the last sixteen hours. This is showing up in data not updating in the ATC Display applet, ServInfo, Whazzup and alike, as well as on the various VATSIM-affiliated websites that have client data displayed.

 

First timeout error I have in my logs is at 14:48 Thursday 30/8/2007 UTC.

 

 

Nick

[Richard Jenkins]

Contacted Luca to take a look at the data server.

[Nick Johnston]

Looks like it's back up again. Thank Luca - does he have access to this forum? - for the quick turn-around!

[George Papanikolopoulos 81]

Yes, he has now!

 

Regards,

[Luca Benelli]

i do have access but it would be best if you drop me an email... i'm not a very constant reader of the forums lately, so a mail at luca AT vatsim DOT net is the best solution i think....

 

Thank you, Luca

 

PS: A single post in THIS thread will have the same effect as i subscribed the thread

[Nick Johnston]

Hi Luca,

 

The data feed server appears to be down - the timestamp in the data is 05:26:50 5/Nov/2007 (coming on two hours ago).

 

 

Nick.

[Luca Benelli]

Should be ok, thanks for the warning...

 

Luca

[Nick Johnston]

No problem, Luca. Thanks for the quick fix.

 

If you like I can have the data feed p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]r here email you automatically if the feed stays down for more than x minutes...

[Luca Benelli]

This would be useful as my own server has had some (lots of in fact) problems recently and i'm not able to check it as i'd like on my own.

Please use the following email: luca (at) vatsim (dot) net.

 

thank you.

[Ross Carlson]

Luca, I thought you already had Nagios set up to monitor the age of the data files. Am I mistaken?

[Luca Benelli]

i had... the last server crash brought the complete system down and i have to recreate it from scratch, i will try to do this in the next weeks, but due to the fact that i am changing work i have little spare time at the moment.

Most scripts are still available (the /home filesystem survived) so it shouldn't be a real problem but i need to find the time to rebuild the nagios system...

 

Luca

[Nick Johnston]

Luca, I've modified my datafeed processing script to email both of us if the timestamp in the data file is more than ten minutes old. Is there anyone else who should be on the recipient list?

 

 

Nick

[Luca Benelli]

at the moment i'd say no... as there's nobody who can effectively make something to correct the problem.

 

Thank you, Luca

[Nick Johnston]

I've just moved the VATNZ over onto using the new client data feed.

 

The last two years I've been working with Luca as my technical contact for the old server and he has been unfailingly fantastic in terms of promptly answering questions, responding to feedback, and getting things working again when the server had a bad hair day. However I understand he is not involved with the new data feed.

 

Who is the equivalent technical contact for the new servers?

 

As an aside, as I write this the new feed hasn't been updated for nearly seven hours (it is still showing data from 13/2/2009 05:16 UTC).

 

 

Nick

[Tim Krajcar]

Me. [email protected]

[Nick Johnston]

Tim,

 

Not sure if you've been checking your email: I sent you an email on Friday evening UTC with a couple of issues that I've encountered since changing over to the new feed. Specifically there appear to be a couple of differences between the old feed and the new one. Most critically there is a bug with colon characters not always being stripped from data fields which breaks the feed.

 

This is causing issues for our online activity tracking and the VATSIM for Google Earth feed among others.

 

Can you give me an ETA on when you expect this to be resolved so that I can let the division staff know.

 

 

Thanks,

Nick

[Tim Krajcar]

Yes, I have been checking my email. The issues you've identified are both to do with the dataserver itself; I've forwarded them to Mike for his review. No ETA to commit to at this time. Tim

[Nick Johnston]

Thanks, Tim. Appreciate the update.

[Nick Johnston]

Tim,

 

 

I've found another bug in the new client data feed.

 

The origin/destination airport lat/long fields (fields 32-35) are all returning '0' rather than the correct values. Can you please investigate this, and provide us with an ETA on when this and the other bugs I've identified will be fixed.

 

Alternatively, if the client data feed is going to remain broken for an indefinite period, can we look at getting the old feed reinstated as it's now been a couple of weeks and from here at least it doesn't appear that there's been any progress made in getting the new feed to correctly replicate the original one.

 

If additional man-power is needed to help speed the response, I'm happy to help out in any way that I can [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ist.

 

 

Thanks,

Nick

[Norman Blackburn]

Hi Nick,

 

I'm pretty sure the lat / lon of airports has been dropped.

[Ross Carlson]

Yes, the airport lat/lon field was intentionally removed from the feed, since the database was very outdated anyway. Applications that use the feed will need to have a local copy of an airport database if they need that info.

[Nick Johnston]

Ah, okay, I'll add the orig/dest lat/long population to my scripts.

 

As one of the main users of the feed it would have been nice to have been consulted or at least notified before decisions like that were made. Were there any other changes to data feed that I need to be aware of (are they docomeented somewhere?) so that I can work out which of the issues I'm encountering are bugs and which are due to changes in functionality? Perhaps we should also update the format docs in the header of the client data file itself as they currently still imply that meaningful orig/dest lat/longs values should be there.

 

The issue causing me the biggest problem is the unescaped colon characters in the fields. That one definitely is a bug and probably 95% of the errors I'm seeing would disappear if we could get that one fixed. Is there any chance of getting some feedback on when that's likely to happen?

 

As I said earlier, I am more than happy to help out if it's a question of manpower.

 

I'm sorry to keep harping on about this, but I am getting messaged daily from staff and users of the websites/applets/etc wanting to know what's wrong and when I'll get it fixed, and it is incredibly frustrating and demotivating to be having to intuit undocomeented (to the extent of my visibility at least) changes to a long-standing published interface, and to have no visibility of the progress (if any) being made on the bugs that I have reported.

 

 

Nick

[Ross Carlson]

I'll let Mike and/or Tim reply about any potential changes.

[Nico Plambeck 904229]

data.vatsim.net is down for a longer time and the great atc applet too.

Does anyone knows more?

[Luca Benelli]

data.vatsim.net was the old data-stats server which has been turned off a couple of months ago.

I really didn't think anybody was still using the atc applet... what do you need it for?

 

Luca