meteohub.de

I am attempting to install a weather bridge purchased from ambient weather behind a Cisco 5500 ASA router. This installation is in a public utility network so the security is multiple layers. We couldn't get the box to install at all using Ambient's directions until we took it to another site and used an unprotected router. It booted, loaded its software stack, and we were able to access the web interface, also used the USB stick features. When we go back to Cisco 5500 everything slows down. It takes 6 minutes to boot. We can get the lan light to come and it blinks. The reset light goes solid. The device grabs an IP but it doesn't open up a port. And we cannot telnet into the device.
We have tried assigning all of network values using the stick and leaving unspecified to use DHCP. No difference in results/behavior. We can't decide if our problem is at the 5500 or if the device is trying to access tau.meteobridge.com and that is getting blocked. We opened up that url in Websense. No change.

We have Davis Vantage Vue Pro 2 with Weatherlink IP console. We plugged that device into the Cisco 5500 and it worked right out of the box. It started sending data to to the davis weather link page. We made no configuration settings.

Can your reach the following URL (giving UTC time) from within your protected LAN?
http://content.meteobridge.com/cgi-bin/utc.pl

If that works the meteobridge.com domain does not seem to be blocked in general.
I don't understand what makes the difference between the WLIP from Davis and the
Meteobridge. Both login to the LAN via DHCP and then reach out via http requests
to a server in the Internet. Meteobridge gets some POST request data back that is a
gziped tar archive. Maybe the router tries todo smart things here in blocking that
content?

Does it need to configure a proxy to get data from the Internet? Corporate LAN
do often provide this as a mandatory "feature".

I think that the issue is more basic than that. We cannot access the setup interface from the local Lan. The router reports that an IP has been assigned to the weather bridge but no port is opened up. Communications with the local Lan has to be established before you can access the internet. We get lights and the weather bridge's LAN light blinks. We are not passing data between the Cisco 5500 and the weather bridge.

Sorry, I am not familiar with your special infrastructure setup. Your network admin should know how to make a DHCP device in your company LAN working and giving it simple HTTP access to the Internet on port 80. When it needs passing a captive portal first and doing some funny authentication there, then you are out of luck.

If you have a separate WLAN in your company that might not be restricted to death like your LAN, this can be an alternative. You can setup the Meteobridge WLAN settings with the cloud configurator tool at "config.meteobridge.com".

I have read through all of the other posts that looked remotely similar. I think that it is an IP issue because it takes it so long to go through boot strap sequence.

Does the weather bridge grab more than one IP?

I think that are problem was that the Cisco router was setup with a restricted range of IP's that the weather bridge could access.

We are going to work on this again next week. I am going to boot the weather bridge up on a different network and make sure it is defaulted.

Do we need any ports other than 80?

Thanks for your help. I will let you know when we have it solved.

Hello,

I am not an expert but maybe you should try to set a static IP to the MeteoBridge via the MAC address.
Then put the allocated IP in DMZ.

I finally solved the problem. I setup an old netgear router as its own network. I left DHCP on. I connected the DAVIS console and the weather bridge to the netgear router.

I then connected the CISCO ASA to the WAN port on the netgear router. The netgear router is bridging the 2 networks.

I think that the issue was that the weather bridge didn't like the IP scheme in the ASA router. The city uses the 3rd octet of the IP address to identify the individual routers, this one was 141.
Scott Harmon