Technical update

Dear all,
I have received several emails reporting a website malfunction during last weeks. I discovered that this was caused by a different behaviour in a recent update of Chrome browser (and all browsers using Chrome engine).
Now website should work normally again.

Have a nice day.
The admin.

Sunday, 18th October 2020 at 19:08:20

Update about: use of this service

I would like to publicly thank the person that was behind the problems of the last days, because this person came to me apologizing for the issues caused. I really appreciated that.

Once again I have to state that this is a completely free project (for which everyone is encourage to make a donation...) so I have very limited hardware resources.
If someone needs lot of meteorological data, please write me an email and I will try to pack all the date, zip it and send it back to you. Please do not run automatic jobs/scripts/crawlers etc!

Enjoy the service responsibly!
The admin.

Wednesday, 11th July 2018 at 22:21:52

Use of this service

Dear users,
I know a lot of time passed since I promised you an update that never arrived.
Unfortunatly this is a long story for which I will not write today, please believe me that I am working for you, something will arrive, it's just that I can't tell you when.

Anyway, today I am going to tell you another little story. A story made by a person that don't get satisfied by something, he/she want all, he/she want now.

So there is this guy (let's imagine is a guy, ok?), a german guy (I'm basing the assumption looking at his IP), that is trying to download most of my METAR database using some scripts. This guy is not so smart, so he made his actions very clear to me since yesterday. But this guy is lucky, because my time is very limited, also is lucky because I have never put in place defensive actions by attack like this. I mean, who will target a COMPLETELY FREE WEBSITE that offers meteorological data?

Most of you also have the chance to know that just by writing me an email I send all the data they need (if I have it!).

But this guy didn't want to ask, he wanted the data now. So he created this script and runned it slowing all the website and the database, the whole server. He filled up all the logs with his IP.

So, very hardly, I found a couple of hours this afternoon to stop him and prevent similar attacks. Now the website accepts only few connections per minute, if, by mistake, you exceed this limit, your IP address will be banned for 2 hours.

I never tought I would ever put such a limit on this website. I hope no "good" user will be catched by this ban, in case this should happend, please write me an email, I will try to unban you ASAP.

Cheers to everybody
The admin.

Monday, 9th July 2018 at 19:12:50

Server change

Dear users,
this afternoon I migrated the web service to another provider (a much more stable and high performance server), unfortunately the migration had to be done in a very short time: this means that there is not so much data. In the next days the server will fill up with new data, in the mean time, if you need some data older than 2 days you will have to file a request through the archive page...
Sorry for the inconvenience.

Have a nice day
The admin.

Friday, 2nd September 2016 at 13:46:34

Outage apologies

Dear users,
please accept my deepest apologies for the outage of the last 5 days. I would like to say that is not my fault and that is all due to my server hosting provider, which is true as a matter of fact, but I feel responsible to have never thought about the possibility that my hosting provider would have failed, so I have never implemented to a backup infrastructure that would have been able to run the public website with all the service (at moment, the backup infrastructure is only able to keep the historical archive safe).
In the next months I will focus on a redundant solution for the website and the back-end server, then I will accelerate the release of the new interface to the donors (I am not forgetting you!!) then I will release the changes to the public.
Thank you for your support, your donations, and for reading this post, I will do my best to improve the stability of this service.

Have a nice day
The admin.

Wednesday, 17th August 2016 at 15:34:24