Thoughts on wview

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

First, I want to say that wview is an excellent piece of software:
useful, clearly structured, well documented, and not too difficult to
install and use. Pretty graphics too. Now that I have it running I'd
like to document the problems that I have had installing it. If anyone
wants to know about the weather in the Oakland Hills, the site is:
http://oaklandweather.no-ip.org/
The wind direction is wrong by about 90°. Unfortunately the wind vane
is on a high roof, which I don't want to climb up to at my current age.
It should be possible to get this fixed soon.
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After installing the software user must:

Start and invoke the wview management site *before* starting the wview
daemons for the first time. In particular be sure that the server is
not set to "Simulator" (unless you want it this way). Even so, the
first archive record generated in
/usr/local/var/wview/archive/wview-archive.sdb
may be corrupt.

Change file ownership and permissions. The system will not
function unless these are changed e.g.:
# cd /usr/local/var
# chown -R apache.apache wviewmgmt
# cd wview
# chown -R apache.apache img
There are some other strange permissions, for example there are a lot
of files with unnecessary execute permissions, which I have changed,
but probably didn't need to. Also a lot of files in the sources that
have the execute bit set.
________________________________________________________________________

My biggest problems in setting up wview arose from a (possibly mistaken)
decision to replace the fan in an old laptop, which I'm using as a
server. Replacing it took a whole day (about 8 hours). But this has very
little to do with wview.)

In the process of replacing the fan, the hardware clock
reverted to the default, which is Dec 10, 2002. I failed to
notice this for a while, and bad clock settings spoiled some
records in one of the archives, which prevented the archive file,
/usr/local/var/wview/archive/wview-archive.sdb, from being updated.

I believe the problem resulted from the records being out of order in
archive file itself,
/usr/local/var/wview/archive/wview-archive.sdb
and not from records being out of order in the VPro2 console. This is
because the problem went away when I zeroed out the file via:
# cd /usr/local/var/wview/archive
# > wview-archive.sdb
Unfortunately, I did other things at the same time, so I have destroyed
the evidence. If this is so, the error message:
vproRunState: you may need to cycle power on the console (including
batteries) to resolve this condition.
should be changed to something like:
vproRunState: you may need to cycle power on the console (including
batteries) to resolve this condition, or you may need to
zero out the file /usr/local/var/wview/archive/wview-archive.sdb
If this theory is correct, the original message caused me about a day of
unnecessary work trying various wrong ideas.
________________________________________________________________________

Some minor complaints:

There should be a space after the comma in the site name. E.g.
Oakland, California Weather
not
Oakland,California Weather

The night time background is so dark that it's not possible to read text
displayed on it. Has anyone made a better night background?

Numbers should be right justified on the Archive pages.

All the best - jon

[Robert Lorenzini]

Time set at default for the console and computer seem to be a reoccurring
problem. A sanity check and warning would be ever so helpful.

Bob