WD on LAN Only - 1 sec updates?

Archive Archived Weather Display Usage Questions
1

I did a search for this question, and only found one reference which was an unanswered question:

I run WD 10.37N (Trial) on my basement “house server” (just a PC serving webpages using Abyss to browsers on PCs around the house). WD on this machine is set up as a clientraw.txt server to the house LAN but not the internet (baby steps, Elly - baby steps).

I run a laptop and a desktop PC upstairs and both are on the house LAN. I haven’t loaded WD on the desktop yet, as I want to get my connection issues squared away on the laptop first. The laptop is WD 10.37N (Trial) as a “stationless” weather station, and the clientraw.txt, datafiles directory, and logfiles directory are all pointed at the WD server downstairs. If I didn’t redirect the log files, I didn’t get the older WD server data if I turned off the laptop for a while… am I understanding this issue correctly?

The documentation on a LAN-only setup is pretty weak, and I hope someone is looking at making it more straightforward - it took me several iterations of working on both the WD server and laptop client to make things work (stupid firewall blocking didn’t help matters much). I work with computers and software and networks at work all the time, so the concepts of how things communicate over an ethernet network aren’t foreign to me. Separation of the LAN-only and Internet setup screens would help immensely here, and the FTP screens are VERY busy and far from intuitive. Just some (soon to be paid up) customer feedback for you.

My primary question is network loading. Now that the client and server are communicating, I notice the laptop WD client main display screen Data “LED” flashes green, and the data counter increments, every second. The Windows Task Manager Network display shows a large network resource hit once every 60 seconds (as high as 50% used!) which matches the WD program updates at the server PC.

So - what is the 1 second update all about and can I reduce it to maybe 50 seconds to more closely sync up with incoming weather station data??

Is the client asking for 1 second updates or is the server just blasting away that oftenm, even though there’s nothing new to update?

Just for the record, what is the required step by step procedure for hooking up a LAN-only WD server and client? Assuming that any firewalls have been set up with WD as exceptions to blocking. I’ll get it started…

S1. Install full WD on PC (connected to weather station)
S2. this PC will be set up as WD server
S3.
S4.
S5.
S6.

C1. Install full WD on PC (NOT connected to weather station)
C2. this PC will be set up as WD client
C3. set WD to be “stationless”
C4.
C5.
C6.

I tried so many things to get my setup working before I discovered the firewall blocking issue that I have no idea what would have worked if the stupid firewall had just been disabled to begin with (I’m behind a DSL/Router hardware firewall so MS’s firewalls are nothing but a nuisance).

Thanks for any help!
Rod

2

How is your clientraw getting the clientraw? Mapped disk/directory or?

Is this the documentation you are referring to as “weak”? If so I’ll be happy to look at any suggestions you might have for improving it.

3

there is no facility to change the 1 second update rates
its only a small file size

4

Niko, I’ve never seen that info before, and its not what the WD Help points at when you’re trying to figure it out on your machine on first install. What I was working from was a single screen of Help text that described in a paragraph each how to hook up a LAN and an Internet connection. Is what’s at that link mentioned anywhere in the WD Help screens? If it is, my apologies, I never ran across it. If it isn’t then it should be - its sure beats the cryptic help file and the huge screen of check boxes and willy-nilly options with unintuitive associations. Having “the best” instructions buried in a user forum isn’t much help to newbies. I eventually go to the user forum for most software products I use, but its not the first place I go to - I assume that’s why there are help files to accompany applications. But thanks for the link - I’m going to print it off and keep it with my files for future reference.

“How is your clientraw getting the clientraw?” Um - what? I don’t understand. If you’re asking me how is the WD Client getting the server’s clientraw.txt, I click the button on the FTP/ClientServer screen that allows me to designate where to get the file, with default set to the Client WD webfiles, and then browse through my network down to the WD Server webfiles directory. I don’t generally map disks for something like this. Should I be doing this differently?

Windy, I realize that the xferred file is small, but if you look at all those wasted packets and the overhead to process them at both ends, they add up after a while. I do other things with my network and work hard to keep it as clean as I can. Which end of the link is initiating this “heartbeat”, the client or the server? If I can’t modify this pulse, well I can’t - but I can’t see why the overhead of unnecessary updates has to be tolerated without a rationale. Is there a functional design reason for doing this? If so, that’s a different story.

Thanks for the help!
Rod

5

there are weather station types that update every 1 second
so that is why its like that