Friday, May 21, 2010

WebProp update update

I received a response from the web host support desk about the problem that is causing the WebProp update scripts to fail to access the WWV solar data. The reply was:

There is nothing we can do to fix this it's a configuration error on their end with their dns. This is occurring because of invalid dnssec configurations at noaa.gov. We will not bypass the dnssec configurations implemented within .gov. The only way to have this corrected is by the dns administrators at noaa.gov signing their zones.

20-May-2010 15:26:00.099 validating @0x827fff000: swpc.noaa.gov SOA: got insecure response; parent indicates it should be secure
20-May-2010 15:26:00.116 validating @0x80284f000: swpc.noaa.gov SOA: got insecure response; parent indicates it should be secure
20-May-2010 15:26:00.159 validating @0xadb055000: swpc.noaa.gov SOA: got insecure response; parent indicates it should be secure
20-May-2010 15:26:00.204 validating @0xad9af8000: www.swpc.noaa.gov A: bad cache hit (www.swpc.noaa.gov/DS)

This is way over my head, but I think they are saying this is due to a problem at NOAA's end not mine.

I will give it a couple more days, but if the problem doesn't go away then I will have to remove WebProp. I know this will be a pain for those who have included it in their websites but there is nothing I can do about it.

7 comments:

Ricardo - CT2GQV said...

You can force (my assumption without looking at the code) the script to get the data by IP bypassing the name resolver (temporary). Looks like that the www.swpc.noaa.gov machine is using DNS load balancing using 2 hosts: 140.172.17.14 and 216.38.80.64.
Authority nameservers for www.swpc.noaa.gov. are answering ok to dns lookups from what I see.

Kelly Keeton said...

2nd that, if this server is yours just hard code the IP address untill this is resolved.

Kelly Keeton said...

google this "host file" if its your server you can just edit that and have this resolved asap

Unknown said...

Thanks for the suggestion guys. I already thought of that. Unfortunately it seems that "swpc.noaa.gov" uses the same IP address as "noaa.gov" so if I just put the IP address I get a 404 error that the file is not on the server. (Try it yourself.) So I guess it is using the same mechanism as g4ilo.com which is also on a shared server and can only be accessed using the actual URL.

Unknown said...

You can solve that last problem if you use and hosts file, but if your running the script on a webserver on a hosting company, that is probably not possible to change.

Unknown said...

It's running on shared hosting, Eric. I do have a NAS device here at home which we use for backup which can run a web server, but because of the cost of electricity here I don't run anything 24/7 and I don't think users would find it useful not to have any updates whenever we go on holiday.

Unknown said...

Looks like NOAA fixed the problem, it's working again!