[Xastir] [APRS_Radio_Built-in_TNC] Linux Xastir and Fetch NWS Alert

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2013, Curt, WE7U wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Feb 2013, iamdadof3 wrote:
>
>> I recently installed Xastir and I have counties highlighting for weather 
>> alerts, and Wx Alert list is populated;  however when I click on "Fetch NWS 
>> Alert" or double click a Wx Alert, I get a "wx_alert_finger_output: connect 
>> to server failed".... anyone have a thought?
>
> Yea.  Subscribe to the Xastir list at www.xastir.org and ask such questions 
> there.  Lots of people hang out there that can answer this and similar 
> questions.
>
> I can answer it since I was directly involved in all the activities relating 
> to the NWS alert changes a few years back, but most of this forum would be 
> disinterested in the discussion.  Plus I don't have the time until tonight or 
> later in the week to answer it properly.  If I remember and get time later, 
> I'll try to answer in personal e-mail.  If you don't hear from me, ask again 
> on the Xastir forum.

So...  Here's the story:

Dale Huguley implemented the first weather alert server.  It ran for years and worked quite well.  At some point he decided that he didn't want to run the service anymore, and gave everybody plenty of warning.  Nobody did anything.  Then one summer he stopped providing the service.  I have no problem with Dale or his decisions:  He did the right thing, warned everybody ahead-of-time, etc.  He provided an excellent service for a number of years which everybody got used to using, and it was dependable.  Dale's server implemented a large subset of the weather alerts, plus allowed the clients to query for details on any particular weather alert.  A big thanks goes to Dale for providing that quality service for a number of years!

Then...  Again, nobody did anything for a while.  Then another ham decided to code up a weather alert server from scratch.  I believe this was Pete?  My memory is getting fuzzy on it now.  Anyway he coded up another one and made some of his own design decisions along the way, which included only putting out alerts for the highest threats.  This server is still running.  It allows the clients to query for additional info on the subset of weather alerts his server provides.

Then along comes myself.  I wasn't happy with the smaller subset of weather alerts provided by server #2, so coded up yet another implementation of a weather alert server (We'll call it server #3) that provided more types of alerts than server #2.  Because of the host I had available to run them on at the time, I couldn't provide the client-query capability to fetch additional information about the individual alerts.  However now I have two additional servers that I have much more control over, so the capability -could- be coded up and provided in the future.  In fact I've been wanting to move the weather alert processing off of the server its on now and run two copies of it in parallel on Firenet-2 and Firenet-3 servers to provide some redundancy.  One thing that makes this more difficult though is that the message numbering I use for weather alerts in the APRS packets differs slightly from what server #2 is using.  The client code for doing the queries would differ between the two.

So there you have it.  More questions?

-- 
Curt, WE7U.        http://wetnet.net/~we7u
APRS in Search and Rescue:  http://wetnet.net/~we7u/search_and_rescue.html