Not sure where this should be posted, but it might be useful sometime for those publishing their Weather site on Synology Diskstations.
We have a house in a fairly remote area north of Christchurch NZ at which I have been running a weather station since 2009. At that time internet had just become available through a wireless network provider and using Weather-Display software I was FTP’ing data to web pages hosted by my domain name service. Eventually I purchased a Synology Diskstation which has web server software built into the OS and hosted my own website.
The wireless service over time slowed down to the point I looked for an alternative and ended up changing to 4G RBI which boosted speeds back up to around 26mbs from 4-5mbs. This worked well until the 4G cell tower obviously had loading problems at peak times reducing the speed back to the 4-5mbs. All through this time the Synology web server operated flawlessly. Meanwhile the wireless system had been improved to speeds of around 55mbs even at peak times… so a change back to them!!
The downside quickly became apparent. The Synology DSM refused to send web pages to the outside world. Enquiries to the ISP elicited no response and a denial that they were blocking port 80 requests. My router settings had not changed and Port 80 forwarding to the server was in place.
At some point in time I had replaced my Diskstation with a later/faster model which meant I had two and the second was installed at our main house in central Christchurch. The solution was to FTP all the weather data to that and re-direct my domain name to it. Not the most satisfactory situation. Internet Trolls search FTP port 21 trying to break into systems and though my system is pretty secure, constant attempts are made when FTP is turned on.
Consulting Dr Google, it became apparent that many ISP’s do in fact block port 80 either for security reasons or to stop people running their own web servers. The suggested solution was to sign up with a service such as No-IP which has a Port 80 Redirect. This allows you to assign an alternate port number (I chose 8080). The service is ostensibly free, but requires confirmation every 3 months, so I took out an annual subscription to save that hassle. If you don’t have a fixed IP you’ll need their paid DDNS service anyway to keep track of your IP . What happens is you create a DDNS hostname and redirect your domain name to it. The service appends the new port number to any page request to your website. On your home router set up a port forward to intercept the new port (8080) to the local port (80). It worked immediately for me and proved that my ISP was indeed blocking port 80.
Problem No2 was to do with the weather forum NZLWN which has a map showing all the stations that belong to it. The map has a script that interrogates the clientraw file (for those running Weather Display software). For whatever reason, the script did not like the port redirection, so the clientraw file (updated every 5 minutes) had to be FTP’d to the City server. Not good! I didn’t want to leave ftp turned on the city diskstation. Time to think outside the square
Synology DSM has a directory synchonisation service, but not one that will synchronise just a single file. I did not want constant synchonisation of all the web directory so I created just one directory called clientraw on the root on both Diskstations. I then set up a user defined script in Task Schedule to copy the clientraw.txt file every 5 minutes from the web directory to the clientraw directory which then synchonised with the equivalent City directory. On the City DSM, I set up another script in Task Schedule to copy the file back to the web directory to run every 5 minutes. The clientraw file is only 1kb in size so the traffic is extremely light and the procedure 100% secure. After a week with no apparent problems, I’m confident all has been resolved.
That’s quite the hassle to get your NAS to host your weather data. I use port 443 for https on my Synology and I haven’t had any issues with my ISP. I’m also lucky that I have gigabit service, so no bandwidth issues. Here’s a [dumb] question: to send data from Weather Display, if you’re running it on a Windows PC, don’t you have to ftp it to the NAS, which requires ftp service on the NAS to be turned on? I never really thought about that until I read your post. When I switched from a webhosting service to my NAS I just changed the ftp location within WD, but it would be better if I could just send the files from my PC to the NAS via my internal network without ftping them - is that possible?
I use system scheduler to copy files via bat file from pc to synology web folder the pc just needs to be logged in to the web folder of corse that only works if there all on the same network with fixed IP’s
Version 7 on synology uses 80 internal and a Port allocated by port forwarding set up for external access
I have a chinese micro pc (2mb of memory/windows10) that runs only WD and performs without too many problems. A drive is mapped to the DSM web directory and WD dumps the files used for my web pages into it. portrobinson.net.nz
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