meteohub.de

Hi,

I have a new Meteobridge Pro + Vantage Vue which is setup to upload to windfinder.com. But I haven't installed and activated the Vantage Vue yet, so no weather data is received by the mpro and so (I assume) no data is being transferred. The relevant windfinder spot page also doesn't show any data.

However, the mpro already reports quite a bit of traffic (10.8 MB in 12 hours time), which is a bit scary as I intend to use a Huawei 4G stick for data transmission at the location the station will be placed. At those kinds of data rates this would be prohibitively expensive.

I read that at each boot the mpro downloads new firmware, so I've changed the relevant setting to "use installed version". Indeed, directly after reboot last evening (12 hours ago) the data usage was already lower, at about 0.5 MB total. However, lots of data has being received over time since then (9.5 MB of the 10.8 total) and I don't understand why. I do see the message "restart meteostick (302 secs no valid rf signal)" every 5 minutes, could it be that the meteostick is also downloading firmware at each restart? Of course, reloading the web interface to check the traffic numbers increases them, but it appears to be on the order of only 10s of kbs per reload. The mpro is currently connected to my home LAN, btw, not the 4G stick

Any clues?

What colour MBPro is this?

Mattk wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2017 1:19 pm What colour MBPro is this?

Not the reply I was expecting

It's a red one

paulm wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2017 1:22 pm

Mattk wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2017 1:19 pm What colour MBPro is this?

Not the reply I was expecting

It's a red one

Because the Red one doesn't need anything else installed to be receiving data from the ISS, the red one has RF built-in so could very well be receiving data depending on how you have set it up. The Black MBPro requires a console/logger etc oh and the red can do what the black one does also but not the other way around.

So maybe the MBPro is/was rebooting when it couldn't detect a signal from the ISS which tends to indicate you haven't configured any of the RF settings? Just a guess without knowing how it has been configured

Not sure I understand what you're saying. The internal RF is indeed configured to receive data, but nothing is sending data to it (the Vue isn't turned on, no battery).

And would the RX traffic reported include the RF data? I haven't checked how the meteostick is connected, but think I saw USB somewhere, so would it show up in the kernel-level network interface stats?

The mpro isn't rebooting by itself btw, so that doesn't explain the RX traffic. Also, too bad the kernel isn't configured to include /proc/<pid>/io, as that could give a clue to which process is generating the traffic.

Crap, seems I was wrong about /proc/.../io, it only reports disk io, not network traffic

If the Vue ISS is not running then the MBPro doesn't know that and thinks it should be finding a RF signal (if the RF is config'd etc) hence maybe the 300 sec continual re-start, check for latest version etc. Have you tried turning the RF config off at this stage and see if things change?

Well, we installed the Vue and meteobridge at the target location today, so data is sent from the Vue ISS and successfully received. However, the amount of traffic is still quite high I think: 3.2MB TX and 6.8MB RX. I especially don't understand where all the received data comes from (perhaps the RF traffic from the Vue is included?). The mbpro has been on for about 7.5 hours, which would translate to 32MB/day, which is just too much. However, we have been checking the web UI a lot today while setting it all up, but I would still expect a lot less traffic. I see no unexpected messages in the Message log either.

Windfinder is the online upload target, currently set at upload every 15 minutes. Remote control is also enabled, that must also eat up a bit of traffic, due to the tunnel from the mbpro to your server having to be kept open?

This MBPro I updated to latest version (1 hour ago) is showing Tx traffic 1.0mb and Rx 6.1Mb, this is a Pro uploading to WOW every 10 minutes. The Rx traffic amount is probably the recent update as I normally run with use installed version, the Tx is probably going to be different depending on the target vendor and their upload/data structure?

Well, I'm going to keep an eye on it for the coming time. I think the amount of traffic is absurdly high, especially receive at 6x transmit. I wonder if it is some form of SSH connection keep-alive being sent from the central meteobridge server to the mbpro unit.

As for the fact that the amount of traffic is vendor-dependent, sure, that's reasonable. However, we only upload to windfinder, currently once per half hour. After the latest reboot a few hours ago we now have sent 800 kb in about 5 hours (including a few reloads of the GUI). Let's say that's only 500kb of windfinder data, meaning 50kb per upload. Even that seems quite high, as the data shown on the windfinder site is limited in time-resolution to what the upload frequency is. I.e the data shown on windfinder doesn't include the full history, only data for the specific upload moments.

please keep in mind that your web traffic to the meteobridge might also add to the totals.

admin wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2017 12:41 am please keep in mind that your web traffic to the meteobridge might also add to the totals.

Sure, I understand that. But when I did successive reloads of the web interface I saw the RX/TX totals increase by a few hunderds KBs. And as I was the only one using the interface that use alone did not explain the high traffic I was seeing.

I now strongly suspect the SSH and/or TCP keep-alive data to consume quite a bit of bandwidth. For example, posts like this (http://opengear.com/blog/how-much-cellu ... d-network/) seem to suggest it can generate quite a large amount of traffic. I'm going to disable the remote login in the near future and see what happens to the traffic numbers.

Okay, after turning off the remote access the amount of traffic per day dropped significantly and to levels that are acceptable (a few MBs per day)