Meteobridge Server Outage

[admin]

This is to inform you about the server outage that happened yesterday (server
is up and running in the meantime) and what I am doing to get this solved for
the future.

I host the Meteobridge server that provides the boot images for the Meteobridge
clients and some processing features (storing long term min/max values, web cam
image uploads and weather data annotations) at one of the well reputated hosting
companies here in Germany. It is Hetzner, where I also do colocation of my special
hardware Meteoplug server and also have generic root servers for web presence and forum
software. For Meteobridge I decided on a virtualized server as one can expect professional
desaster recovery as part of the virtualization concept (this takes some of the
burden from my shoulders) and no risks of longer outages by failed HW as
virtual servers can be moved in no time to new Hosts and continue running there.
Well this is the theory, but Hetzner demonstrated so far, that their VServers
are not ready for prime time. I am sorry for that.

The server is now up again, but I am just building a virtual server for Meteobridge
in North America. As this time it is a large provider with world wide reach, I am confident
not to have these outages any more and to get the benefits of virtualization not just on paper.

To make your Meteobridge independent in operation from the server you can add
a FAT32 formatted USB stick to it. Meteobridge will then store the needed images
on next boot on the stick and from then on it will boot from USB stick if server cannot be reached
after several tries. In that case some special features like payment function for Meteobridge purchase,
etc will not be functional but the normal operation will be fine without a server being online.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but at least I wanted to explain what happened and what I am
doing to solve this issue.

[saratogaWX]

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Boris!

I've added a FAT32 formatted USB stick to my TP-LINK TL-MR3020 running Meteobridge as you have suggested.

Best regards,
Ken

[admin]

I migrated this evening to a virtual server in North America. As it runs Ubuntu
instead of Open-SuSE we had some struggles here and there, but it should now
operate flawless and hopefully without the sequence of outages we had with
Hetzner lately.

May be there are one or two quirks I overlooked. If so I will take care tomorrow...