I just downloaded bith versions 5.5c and 5.6 beta3. Both do not work for me, as they say “Server not found”.
At first I tried to find my hometown (I did that with previous versions) and the program said 0 cities found. It didn’t find any city, no matter if it’s London or a smaller one.
As I tried to update the forecast anyway (without having set the active city), the program said “Server not found”. As I look at my Internet connection status at that time, it doesn’t even try to access the Internet. It just say that there’s no server. There is no difference if there if or isn’t a firewall.
Many others are having problems and have not changed anything. One tested it by shutting down the firewall so it’s not a firewall problem.
I’m thinking weather.com has changed something to block weatherwatcher and other programs from getting information from their servers suddenly or may have changed their server or something.
Weather Watcher is working fine… Weather.com has not changed anything. I think the problem might have been caused by a Windows update. Then again, I just installed all of the Windows updates and Weather Watcher is still running OK (on Windows XP SP2). The problem definitely has something to do with individual system settings.
quote:Many others are having problems and have not changed anything
[b]Fuzzie Dice[/b], that sounds logical, but many people are running software that automatically updates. Yes, they don't do anything to initiate the updates, but the updates are still installed.
One of the things the SP2 update does is active the XP firewall, in some cases even if the client has another one installed. That’s what happened to my XP system. Thus disabling the firewall the client knows about doesn’t disable the XP one.
On fully updated Windows 98 and XP systems WW is updating fine here. It’s possible the people having problems received an antivirus update that added or activated their antivirus’s firewall.
Without specific information as to what OS, version, firewall, antivirus and etc it’s hard to provide a definitive answer to the problem. But I would suspect it’s something they all have in common.
The problem Fuzzie Dice refers to is the situation Weather Pulse had last year. Maybe he has used that sw and got burned thus assumes the same situation exists for WW. Needless to say, that is not the case with WW.
It will be interesting to find what is causing this rash of outages though.
I never used any other weather service than weather watcher.
Furthermore nothing was changed at all between the time it was working fine and the time it stopped working.
My answer was based on the “IM Wars” where IM servers would block out competing or open source software from hoooking up to their server so you had to use their proprietary software and not software from another source. I was thinking perhaps that may have happened in this instance too.
My settings are no different now then when Weather Watcher was working. It just stopped suddenly. I didn’t add any new programs or updates between the time it was working and the time it wasn’t. It just mysteriously stopped and never started working again.
So I have no clue what is going on. “Error! Server Not Found” would mean just that - server wasn’t found. I have no proxy server on this machine. I’ve shut down ZoneAlarm (free version) and AVG Virus Scanner and still it did not connect to a server. All my other programs, GAIM, jetMailMonitor for example, which also monitor my connection all work fine still.
So I am at a complete loss as to why Weather Watcher is still not working for me.
You’re running XP? SP2? If so you’ve checked XP’s firewall to ensure it’s inactive?
You have DL.exe in the WW folder?
Your IE security settings do not have Weather.com listed? If you can access Weather.com via IE that means it’s not listed.
I wonder if it’s the DNS server not being found. Or if Weather.com moved some servers around and the DNS server has not been updated. But then you wouldn’t be able to access Weather.com from IE either.
Obviously AVG has been updated during this time period, does it’s logs show any viruses as being found recently?
quote:[i]Originally posted by Mike Singer[/i]
Try this --> [http://www.singerscreations.com/RSS/Posts/138.asp](http://www.singerscreations.com/RSS/Posts/138.asp)
Mike, that worked! I don’t know why it suddenly caused problems though as I always had IE set to not save encrypted pages to disk. Now that I unchecked that, WW is working again.
To answer other questions, I’m using:
Windows 98SE (with updates from when MS released mega windows updates recently)
Internet Explorer 6
ZoneAlarm free version 3.7.193
AVG Virus Scanner free version 7.0.300 and latest updates (it updates daily) but I don’t have it set to monitor programs as that seems to slow the machine down sometimes and some programs don’t like it.
I also use GAIM for Yahoo/AIM/MSN Messenger
I use FireFox 1.0 for default browser and Thunderbird 1.0 for email
dl.exe is in the weather watcher directory.
What I did to make sure the fix was what solved the problem, I tried both with “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” on (checked, and Weather Watcher gave the server not found error) and then off (unchecked, which Weather Watcher works fine)
Thanks Mike. I’m going to write this in my notes for future reference.
Didn’t work for me… because I never have that checked. Just today, it started with the “server not found” error. I installed the newest version because I STILL kept getting the occasional “runtime error” when clicking on the severe alert bubble tooltip, so figured upgrading to the newest beta would fix it. Well, not only did it not fix it, it made it worse.
Can you tell us about Weather.com’s commitment to the data feed that WW uses?
Also, could WW determine that it does have Internet connectivity, but that the Weather.com data feed is unavailable, then tell the user to “Try later. Data feed presently unavailable.”?
quote:[i]Originally posted by PatrickB[/i]
Can you tell us about Weather.com's commitment to the data feed that WW uses?
Also, could WW determine that it does have Internet connectivity, but that the Weather.com data feed is unavailable, then tell the user to “Try later. Data feed presently unavailable.”?
</font id=“quote”></blockquote id=“quote”> I would imagine their goal is to keep the data feed up 24-7. It probably only goes down when they are having technical difficulties. That would make sense since they are not used to getting the traffic they get when severe weather hits. You would think they would learn and beef up their systems…
I will look into the special message for Weather Watcher. This doesn’t happen often, so I will have to wait until it happens again so I can see how the data is coming in.
quote:[i]Originally posted by EdP[/i]
Is there anyway we can capture a data feed and send it to you when it occurs?
A basic way for you to test if there is a problem, disconnect the LAN cable from your router and see what WW produces.
</font id=“quote”></blockquote id=“quote”> No, there is no way to capture the feed.
Uplugging the LAN cable will not generate the same error. Weather Watcher will display the same error, but the cause of the error will not be the same.
Bob’s vbs script creates a text file of a weather.com’s data feed. If the locID in it is updated to reflect the user’s location it should help debug the data feed problems.
I’m going to write this in my notes for future reference.