UPDATE - 02/02/2019: As of today, the bulletins seem to be back again. What in the world is going on with Facebook, here? -Todd

Hoo boy. This might be it for the Facebook weather bulletin posts. Facebook has been threatening for a long time now about the possibility of this happening. Now, it looks like it's finally happening.

Getting lots of authorization errors in the EMWIN logs for many of our Facebook EMWIN weather bulletin posts. Some of the pages affected include:

• Alachua County SKYWARN
• Alachua County EMWIN
• GNVWeather
• GVLWeather
• Hurricane Bulletins - Florida
• Bradford County Emergency Management
• Calhoun County Emergency Management
• Holmes County Emergency Management

Pages so far NOT affected include:

• Gulf County Emergency Management
• Liberty County Emergency Management
• Washington County Emergency Management

Until we have some severe storms, it remains unknown if the GVLStorms Facebook page is affected or not.

...But those are probably gonna be hit soon, too, most likely.

We'll keep looking into this, of course. If there is a way to continue the bulletins, we will try to find it. But on first glance, it looks a little bit complicated and may not be anything we can do anything about. But we'll try.

This isn't just affecting us. It's affecting anybody who uses automated "apps" with their weather server to deliver weather bulletins to Facebook. (Apps as in Facebook apps, not like...cellphone apps. Not the same thing.)

In the meantime, our sincere apologies if this affects anyone in a negative way. But it appears to be something that is beyond our control at the moment. :(

Note that this does NOT affect the delivery of AC-EMWIN bulletins by any other means. Delivery by text, email, fax, listgroups (AC-SKYWARN, AC-EMWIN, SKYWARN-L, ACWIN-*, ACEMWIN-HURR-L, etc) are not involved in the Facebook changes of course, and are still fully operational.

Todd Sherman, Coordinator/Project Mgr
Alachua County SKYWARN
Alachua County EMWIN

Additional AC-EMWIN Backup Server...

Thanks to Jim Carr / KC4MHH, for providing us with a whole new server machine to store our AC-EMWIN server software upon. As of September 3rd, the server is now up and running in standby mode, receiving NOAA/NWS weather bulletins at all times. Should anything happen to the main server machine, the backup can be pulled into active mode. This makes for two backup machines, now.

Sysop-wise, a nightmare past three weeks...

OMG. What a nightmare the past three weeks have been.

Started out with Facebook changing security priviledges for "apps", which affected our server's ability to send weather bulletins to Facebook. Until we were able to figure out a workaround for that, everything on Facebook was down. It also affected our postings to the pages of several northern Florida Emergency Management agencies, and made us look very bad...even though it wasn't our fault. And I don't like looking bad.

After spending a god-awful lot of time daytime and into many late evenings and sometimes early mornings, I and a bunch of other beta testers were able to pool our own hands-on, experimental knowledge until we were able to figure out how to work with the Facebook changes.

Right on the heels of getting things going again on Facebook, then the Fireline server crashed. Not sure on the deeper, more technical specifics of how it happened. But...

...Something to do with the server software being old...originally 2003, upgraded to 2007. Then came an automatically downloaded "upgrade" and all hell broke loose. Nothing worked anymore. All dirs on the server had their permissions reset. Dirs became "unmapped". We could work with a top dir, and a third level dir, but the middle dir...it was as if the server "forgot" it was there. ...Things like this. We had to literally start from scratch with Fireline. All web pages ceased to function. People couldn't see them because permissions had been reset and no one was "allowed" access and they got errors when they tried. The maps on the ACS page stopped updating. The marquee scroller and the bulletin scroller both stopped working. Access ceased to the online EMWIN bulletins archive. Bitly links in Facebook postings no longer worked because access to the online EMWIN bulletins archive couldn't be had anymore. You can see all the cascading problems that resulted.

Both I and the Fireline sysop tried really hard, staying up late at night, to try to stay ahead of all of the problems and to try to figure out how to get the Fireline and the AC-EMWIN servers to work together again. We felt like Data trying to stay ahead of all the "cascading failures" with Lal. (...If you remember the ST:TNG episode where Data had built a daughter.) In Data's case, he was unsuccessful and Lal ceased functioning. In our case, I think we actually licked it, and things are again functional. But I'm going to say that with wariness because on Facebook I've said that before and then something drastic happened and we had to start all over again - and I don't want to jinx myself. :)

The Fireline server software is old and no longer supported by Microsoft. The sysop wants to upgrade it but the cost is just ridiculously prohibitive. We're talking on the order of $4500. Double that for the backup server in case the first one goes down.

At this point, I believe we've finally been able to get everything back up and operating EXCEPT for a couple of Emergency Management agencies. But Facebook pages for Alachua Co SKYWARN, the Alachua County EMWIN Project, GVLStorms, GVLWeather, and GNVWeather, should again be operating as normal from this point onwards.

Let's hope something like that that doesn't happen again for a while. I think I've had about enough this past few weeks and I need a serious vacation. (sigh) It's been nerve-racking.

All that being said, we believe in a couple of mottos wholeheartedly, though...

First of course is "NEVER give up! NEVER surrender!" -Peter Quincy Taggert, Galaxy Quest

Secondly, you've got "Failure is not an option!" -Eugene Krantz (during the Apollo 13 disaster)

And well, of course, you have Coln. Jack O'Neill too, who once said, "So, when your back's up against the wall, and there's no tomorrow, just take one day at a time, and remember...the bigger they are, etcetera."

But the best, most important words of advice came from my cat, Stormy, who with a stare quite serious, sternly advised..."Meow." ...And I believe he was right on.

UPDATE - MAY 24, 2015: Everything again functional. texts to email, pagers, cellphones, listgroups, Facebook, Twitter, web pages...everything...including all our Emergency Management Agency customers. Even gained an additional EM customer: Liberty County. So at the moment, we're serving the following EMA Facebook pages: Bradford Co, Gulf County, Holmes Co, Liberty Co, and Washington Co...with the possibility of Bay Co soon joining the bandwagon, too. :)

AC-EMWIN Soon To Get Faster Bulletins!

Things go just right, and by sometime tomorrow some of our AC-EMWIN weather bulletins may be coming out up to a minute or so faster as we add a speedier additional bulletin ingest method!

Currently, our bulletins have been coming out about the same time as or up to 15 seconds before the NOAA Weather Radio. This new ingest method could significantly improve our notification time averages.

Can't wait to get it hooked up and see!

"Isolated Tornado Potential" this evening...

From NWS-JAX:

"Isolated tornado potential this evening through early Wednesday..."

See "Severe Storms Possible" tab: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jax/

AC-EMWIN Server Down August 20th-21st...

The AC-EMWIN Server program somehow got locked up yesterday afternoon about 2pm and no bulletins went out for about a 24 hours period. This went unnoticed because I was not able to make my normal daily remote checks on the server due to the fact that I had suffered an on-the-job injury and had been busy with doctors appointments and related medical paperwork and dealing with insurance people.

While the server program might have been down the ingest program, however, continued to actually receive all bulletins downloaded through the EMWIN pipeline and on restart they were all eventually distributed, if but late, for some.

At this time, though, the server is again operating normally. We apologize for any inconvenience.

AC-EMWIN Server Hiccup Last Night (Now Resolved)

Looks like the AC-EMWIN server had a hiccup, last night...

The AC-EMWIN server program locked up at about 8:45pm. All the other SUB-programs kept operating and passing on files which were apparently stuck in the ingest directory (the place where the program temporarily places new bulletins just downlinked, which are USUALLY then immediately *deleted* after they've been processed). So ZFPs and HWOs that didn't get deleted from the ingest dir (because the program locked up at just the right time) and the other subprograms just kept pulling them so they got duped to some Facebook pages a couple times overnight. As well, the radar images from 8pm last night kept getting resent all night until I noticed it early this morning after getting up.

As to how I even noticed that things were locked up... On getting up I noticed that the EMWIN test clients - here at the house, and which are connected to the main server remotely - weren't offering up the normal early morning beeps and sounds that occur when they receive the usual morning ZFPs and HWOs and paints things on the map. After years of being used this this, you notice something's not right almost immediately. This caused me to take a look around and check for problems. Indeed, the AC-SKYWARN web page hadn't refreshed the watch/warning map since 8:30pm last night. All the text bulletins on the AC-EMWIN page were "old" from late yesterday afternoon/evening. As well, no (current) bulletins were being sent to the surrounding area Emergency Management Facebook pages which were subscribed to us. (EEK!)

We're in the middle of some current ongoing weather so I didn't even bother to deal with checking logs and figuring things out. I just rebooted the machine entirely right away and that seemed to take care of it.

...So things are again working properly. I'll keep an eye on the server to make sure it doesn't happen again. The program usually worked very efficiently and I almost never had any problems with it and it's pretty stable so I don't expect another problem like that.

Coincidentally, the server hiccup started the process of me checking ALL resources for the possible problem and this included checking Alachua FreeNet. While it's not part of our server problem, I discovered that Alachua FreeNet is also apparently down, too. Something hung on THEIR server, too, last night and some of you may notice that your web page dirs are empty. (EEK!) I've notified AFN admin about it and they're taking a look. So in a way, you can thank our own server hiccup for causing a causal exploration which ended up discovering the AFN outage. :)

TAMPA AREA BULLETINS STOPPED WORKING FOR SHORT WHILE - PROBLEM RESOLVED

Got an email from Cape Coral FD Facebook page's admin advising that they weren't seeing ANY bulletins being sent to their FB page for quite a while. On checking our server logs, we saw no errors. Then again, we copuld confirm nothing going out to CCFD - including the daily ZFPs. On checking them again, we noted that the logs confirmed that other NWS FOs are sending out ZFPs, but there are NONE WHATSOEVER noted coming out of NWS Ruskin/Tampa. It was strange. Sent out a few queries to see if anyone else in EMWIN-land knew what was going on.

First time we'd ever encountered such an odd problem before. It was actually location specific.

On doing further research, it appears that NWS-Ruskin (Tampa) has changed quite a number of zone codes for numerous bulletins handled within it's CWA. Many zones which were previously handled as single counties have now been divided up into "inland" and "coastal". When they made the changeover on the 3rd, the old zone codes for the affected counties suddenly ceased working.

The new zone codes were updated into the server setup and all affected bulletins were again working with our system.

NWS had apparently sent out a Public Notification bulletin (PNS) about it but it slipped by us.

Error Corrected On AC-EMWIN Hurricane Graphics Index Page...

WHOOPS! Caught an error on our hurricane graphics index page and corrected it. We prepare the index page manually and if there's a confusing situation as happened with Hernando - where it died, then reformed again, and the NHC renames the old to TC-8 and starts a completely NEW set of bulletins for a newly-formed Humberto it throws off all the rest of the naming system on our page. So post-Humberto deformation, Humberto became TC-8, Ingrid became Humberto, and Jerry became Ingrid, etc. So we added an additional line of code to handle the TC-8 graphic, and then adjusted the numbering of all the subsequent graphics so that they were correct again. Sorry for any inconvenience. Was a pain in the butt for us, too. :)

Incidently, if anyone is good with web page coding and would like to submit to us some new code which might handle all that automatically and create a page that looks the same way it does now, we'd be glad to use it.

AC-EMWIN Now Serving Cape Coral FD Facebook Page...

In addition to serving the Facebook pages of the Bradford County and Gulf County EMAs, we can now add the Cape Coral Fire Department to the list. All three EMAs are now receiving weather alerts from Alachua County SKYWARN's EMWIN program. So I guess we can officialy brag that we're serving the panhandle, north central, and south Florida areas. This is on TOP of already providing many people in the local area general public with weather alerts to their pagers, cellphones, and personal email accounts...ALL FOR FREE!!!

Not bad for an organization that begs NO money from people - claiming no dues, grants, or funding.

ACEMWIN-HURR-L List Gets A Publicity Boost from NOAA...

It started with 842 hits to the ACEMWIN-HURR-L list web page in one day!!!

On Monday (7/15/2013), we had just 35 or so subscribers. On the very next day, Tuesday, we suddenly had 842 hits to the ACEMWIN-HURR-L page, and a total of 171 subscribers to the list! That's a jump of about 140 new subscribers...IN JUST ONE DAY!

...Un-be-LIEVABLE!!!

[UPDATE: As of 7/25, the web site has seen nearly 2000 hits since the beginning of the month, and membership has reached to OVER 400 subscribers, now. The attention has waned drastically since the first few initially frantic days, down to an average increase now of about 10-15 new subscribers per day, with larger increases seen during periods of tropical activity. Can't complain.]

This, after NOAA listed us on a government web page of "alternate" informational weather bulletin sources across the US. Why? Recently NOAA/NWS sent out a notice (see here) that the free weather bulletin services offered by GovDelivery would soon cease as of July 31st.

It all started on July 10th. What called our attention to all the ballyhoo was quite a number of sudden odd hits from NOAA to the ACEMWIN-HURR-L list. (The ACEMWIN-HURR-L listgroup offers up a number of various types of NHC-issued hurricane bulletins, and offers users the power to customize WHICH hurricane bulletins they want to receive through the list. The list iteslf gets the bulletins from the server owned and run by the Alachua County EMWIN Project, which provides weather alerts to local area users for free as a public service.) That's when they put us on their list (see here). They must have been researching our listgroup, at first - which explains why all the suddenly noticed hits in the IP logs. Right after that they obviously added us to their list. Next thing you know, IP logs began showing HUNDREDS of people looking us up from all over the United States as well as across the globe. Especially attention grabbing were the hits from the US Department of State, and the Dept. of Homeland Security. Gotta make us feel proud. And of course even more hits come from people from all walks of life. We also can't help but notice all the subscriptions from entities from all those various islands in the Atlantic, too. Very interesting.

Makes yuh feel so good to see that. This kind of stuff just keeps happening with us. Other notable moments to make us proud came when Bradford County Emergency Management came to us with a request to send Bradford-related storm bulletins to their Facebook page, which was soon followed by Gulf County EM with the same request. On top of that, we're serving severe weather bulletins to the pagers, cellphones, and emails of many local and surrounding area users. We're also sending same to numerous different email listgroups, Facebook, and Twitter pages.

It makes you feel really proud. You work so hard to put something together so that it can be helpful in service to the public. You put your own money into it; your own blood, and sweat, and sometimes, yes, even tears. You ask for no money or attention or awards in return, and you get...THIS. This is proof that what we're trying to do is truly meaningful...that what we're doing is important. This kind of attention just makes it all worthwhile and it's *better* than receiving some silly piece of paper or a plaque of wood with your name on it.

This is wonderful. You work so hard. You're patient. Then it all WORKS...perfectly. And it helps people.

At the risk of sounding a little like the A-Team's Hannibal here (sigh)...I LOVE it when a plan comes together!

More information about the Alachua County EMWIN Project and all of the things that it now does, and what it can do for you, can be found at http://alachuaskywarn.org/emwin.

Newly-obtained AC-EMWIN IP Address Blocked...

Last week, we discovered that the Alachua County Office of Emergency Management was..."blocking" us. Well, it wasn't quite that simple...

After doing some further research, we discovered that the problem wasn't nearly so simple as one agency blocking us. Apparently, there are multiple varied sources out in Internet-land which keep track of IP addresses which spam. Then people - especially many government agencies - subscribe to these lists in an effort to try to weed out spam. Unfortunately, after a while, the spammers then release the tarnished IP addresses back into the Internet wild. Then the companies who sell them - the Internet Service Providers, or "ISPs" - turn around and RE-sell them again (now that the IPs have had plenty of time to glean plenty of bad reputation) to innocent, unsuspecting people in the general public.

Along comes now the Alachua County EMWIN Project, which just moved it's server to a better location with a generator backup and two Internet lines for the "just in case" situations. Upon moving to this new location, we acquired a "new" IP address. Unbeknownst to us, this pariticular IP address was one which had such a bad reputation that it was listed not just in one but in MULTIPLE spam-tracking databases. These databases apparently have the power to "blacklist" the IP addresses to such an extent that in some cases people were not able to receive our alerts.

When we first began to notice this was going on, it was because we were getting some emails stating that some of our alerts to some people were being blocked because our IP was being blacklisted as a source of spam. The emails weren't very clear though, and made it seem as if it might be the end user who had had us blocked. On further backtracking, it became apparent that the user wasn't responsible at all. The user's ISP was using these blacklists to block emails from so-labelled IP addresses. The County of Alachua uses at *least* one, called Barracuda Central. And when we checked, that's when we found that we were listed in about five.

We sent out a few querying emails to some computer-related listgroups in the hopes that someone might be able to shed more light on how to combat this. A few people helped out with links to places which help you find OUT how many databases have you listed. This began an effort to try to get us "delisted" from all of the blacklists.

(*sigh!*)

Apparently, us end users have to watch out for this. APPARENTLY, places like Cox and AT&T aren't going to TELL you if the IP that they're selling you has a bad reputation; and APPARENTLY, they don't bother to *check*, either. So it's on us. We're assigned the "new" IP address, and we have NO idea that it's been used by someone else in a bad way. And then the nightmare starts.

I've spent the last week trying to communicate with five different blacklist databases to try to get us delisted. I think I've been successful, but it's going to take a while to find out. Apparently, like the search engines, they're all interconnected. One borrows from the other, borrows from the other, and so on. So you have to find out all the contact information, and write all the emails. Then you have to wait 48 to 72 hours for most of the databases to recognize and remove you. And in some cases, it can take even longer.

...Good lord! What a pain in the ass! I think that the ISP sellers should be the ones who "clean up" the reputation FOR you if they're going to sell you an IP address. Meanwhile, I think we've cleaned up the mess, now. What was it that the little lady said in Poltergeist, again? Oh yes... "...THIS house...is CLEAN." (poses for the camera)

Let's hope we never have to go through THAT again. :(

Generator Backup for AC-EMWIN Server

The AC-EMWIN server is now located behind a gas generator automatic backup in case the power goes out. It also has a backup internet line, now. Should one line go out, the other will automatically take over.

With Bradford County EMA (Facebook page; area cellphone/email users) and Gulf County EMA (Facebook page) both now being supported by our system, things are starting to take on much more serious tone. Under our old setup, had the power gone out, that would have been it, and it would have been extremely embarassing. Under this new setup, should the power go out, our system will keep operating for as long as the gas holds out. And should one internet line go out, we'll have at least one backup opprtunity for things to continue.

Cooperative Ventures, Deux!

Impressed with seeing what we were doing for Bradford County Emergency Management's Facebook page, Gulf County EM contacted us and asked if we could do something similar for their own Facebook page (see).

We are now sending various severe weather AND hurricane-related bulletins to the Gulf County EM Facebook page.

Glad to be able to help! :O)

Dust Settled...

Looks like everything is again working. Web pages show normally. Text and graphics products are again flowing to the web sites. Graphics are again displaying on the web pages. Everything looks good. If anyone notes anything amiss with either the AC-SKYWARN or AC-EMWIN web pages, please let us know. Todd

Pardon Our "Dust"...

Our service provider is changing the server software to a newer version and as a result users of the AC-SKYWARN and AC-EMWIN pages may see some funky things for a little while. Please bear with us. May take a little while to work out some kinks which may pop up.

Cooperative Ventures!

We're now providing severe weather bulletins to Bradford County area users.

In the spirit of public service, we're expanding our services to now provide severe weather bulletins to email and cellphone for Bradford County area users. Sponsored by Alachua County SKYWARN, the Alachua County EMWIN Project, and the Bradford County Office of Emergency Management.

What makes our service different is the customizeability that most other services don't offer, such as the ability to either BLOCK/TRASH bulletins during certain time periods, like say, overnight; or to HOLD bulletins after hours and still send them in the morning anyway if users wish, maybe because they still want to know what happened overnight.

We've already been providing these bulletins to BCEM's Facebook and Twitter pages, too, for quite a while, now.

New AC-EMWIN Server!

We now have a brand new web server!

The Alachua County EMWIN server was switched out with a newer, much faster one this afternoon and y'all didn't even know it! :) Not a beat was missed in the switchover and everything went perfectly and smoothly. In fact, I'm kinda nervous because I'm waiting for Murphy's Law to kick in at any moment. It was as simple as installing all the Windows Updates and then transferring the weather software over to the new machine. Hmm.

The old server was a chugging 1.6 GHz, 32-bit, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD clunker that was completely adequate 8 years ago; but the EMWIN software was getting more complicated as it became continually upgraded over the years and we were starting to experience some occasional drags and lockups. So we went to TigerDirect and for $239 got a refurbished 3.4 GHz, dual core, 64-bit, 2 GB RAM, 400 GB HDD, 8 USB port monster-engined speedster. :) No more dragging or lockups, and everything works SO much faster.

The server serves both Alachua County SKYWARN and Alachua County EMWIN, and sends weather bulletins to email, pager, cellphone, and to listgroups at UF and on Yahoo, as well as to Twitter accounts, and to Facebook accounts - for FREE as a public service.

The old server will remain in inventory as a backup/standby server.

(Yer welcome!)

UPS Replaced

Had to replace the AC-EMWIN system UPS. Past couple days it started acting squirrley. Would have some sort of hiccup which caused it to beep endlessly in one long, unending tone. When I'd go into the room to check, I'd find the red light flashing, and the desktop would be blank - no EMWIN software running.

I'd reset the battery. Red light would keep flashing. I'd turn the battery off and then back on. Wouldn't do anything. Unplugged it for a while. Didn't help, either. Left it alone and restarted the EMWIN software and let it be, to see what would happen.

In subsequent days, same thing would happen. Sometimes, after a while, the battery light would go green again, BUT, I'd find all the EMWIN software unloaded again, and a naked desktop (i.e., just the normal icons and folders, with no programs running), as if the system had been rebooted. Odd.

So, the battery was apparently having some kind of hiccup wherein it would shut down all the software that was running, shut down the computer, and then restart the computer. But in the occasions where it would reboot the computer, there would be no warning. No beep, nothing. AND, mysteriously, you'd find the battery light lit green.

This was not acceptable and obviously the battery was in a non-relilable state so I went out and purchased a new one.

The system is again operating normally.

New AC-EMWIN Facebook/Twitter Feeds

Spent the past week learning new ways to distribute the bulletins to Facebook and Twitter. Experimented and fiddled and finally got things working.

AC-EMWIN is now distributing some limited bulletins to our AC-SKYWARN and AC-EMWIN Facebook and Twitter pages.

We are ALSO distributing bulletins to the Facebook page of our friends at the Bradford County Office of Emergency Management so that their page can benefit from timely weather bulletins, too. Michael Heeder also advises us that he is receiving lots of compliments on the new weather bulletins being fed to the Bradford EM page, and on their timeliness.