Darwin (NRDP) push port outage?

[Robert Topolowski]

Hello all,

Did anyone else experience issues with the NRDP (not RDM) Darwin push port feed yesterday? My connection dropped from ~4am until ~2am this morning and I am trying to work out why.

Kind regards,
Robert

[Peter Hicks]

Hi Robert

On Monday, 27 October 2025 at 11:37, Robert Topolowski <rob...@topolowski.com> wrote:

Did anyone else experience issues with the NRDP (not RDM) Darwin push port feed yesterday? My connection dropped from ~4am until ~2am this morning and I am trying to work out why.

No issues seen here - message rates are as expected:

What did the connection drop on your side look like?  There's a big difference between having a TCP connection alive but not receiving any messages, and being entirely unable to open a new TCP connection.

Peter

[Robert Topolowski]

I was experiencing intermittent disconnections from around 1am yesterday, followed by a disconnection from just before 4am and every reconnect request being rejected until 2am today.

My STOMP client (using stomp.py) was throwing ConnectFailedExceptions every time it tried to reconnect during that period, example shown below.

Usually this indicates an issue on the NRDP end rather than on my end but according to the service desk no one else reported issues so now I have no idea what happened. I made no changes to my client before, during or after the disruption so the self-resolution is also baffling.

Kind regards,

Robert

[Peter Hicks]

Hi Robert

I'm connecting to kb-dist-261e4f.nationalrail.co.uk - if you are too, then it seems to be something specific to your end.  However, if you're connecting to a different hostname/IP address, then it might be that there's more than one server and you're on one that may have had a fault.

"Nobody else has reported an issue" just means that nobody else has reported an issue, not that there wasn't​ an issue.  I'm not aware of some kind of rate-limit on new TCP connections on CACI's side, but it could be any number of things - something between your client and CACI (e.g. AWS intrusion prevention) classifying your connections as somehow wrong and blocking them.

It's gonna be tricky to get to the bottom of this :(

Peter

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[Robert Topolowski]

Hello Peter,

Interesting, on NRDP that url is listed as the host for the KB RTI feed but not for the Darwin push port - I'm connecting to darwin-dist-44ae45.nationalrail.co.uk.

Unfortunately I also suspected it wouldn't be too easy to identify the issue. My NRDP client is being retired soon anyways so I guess it isn't a massive issue (provided it doesn't start happening often!), just wanted to confirm whether or not others were experiencing issues.

Thanks for your help!

Kind regards,

Robert

[Ryan Underwood]

Hi All,

We're observing the same outage. Connection errors occurred on Saturday, coming back online Sunday, and we can see it is down again today.

Kind regards,

Ryan.

[Peter Hicks]

On Monday, 27 October 2025 at 12:45, 'Ryan Underwood' via A gathering place for the Open Rail Data community <openrail...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

We're observing the same outage. Connection errors occurred on Saturday, coming back online Sunday, and we can see it is down again today.

I wonder if it's a protocol-specific issue.  I'm using OpenWire, but it looks like Robert is using Stomp.

Connecting using telnet to darwin-dist-44ae45.nationalrail.co.uk port 61616 (OpenWire) suggests it's using ActiveMQ 5.15.6 which is quite old (see https://endoflife.date/apache-activemq).  Incidentally, when I try to connect to port 61613, I get a TCP connection opened and immediately closed which might indicate a problem in accepting new connections whereas existing ones may be fine.

Peter

[Peter Hicks]

On Monday, 27 October 2025 at 12:52, 'Peter Hicks' via A gathering place for the Open Rail Data community <openrail...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I wonder if it's a protocol-specific issue.  I'm using OpenWire, but it looks like Robert is using Stomp.

It looks like there's an issue connecting to both of those hosts over Stomp.  This is using stomp.py 8.2.0:

(stomp) pwh@piccadilly:stomp% python3 -m stomp -H darwin-dist-44ae45.nationalrail.co.uk -P 61613

lost connection

(stomp) pwh@piccadilly:stomp% python3 -m stomp -H kb-dist-261e4f.nationalrail.co.uk -P 61613    

lost connection

Same thing occurs on two separate Internet connections.  So it appears there is a problem!

Peter

[Aaron Claydon]

I’ve been getting connection resets on my Darwin stomp client since Saturday too.

[Robert Topolowski]

Hello all,

I have asked the service desk to look into it again. I'll pass on any updates that I receive, their email address is dsg_darwin...@caci.co.uk should anyone wish to open a ticket with them (or keep it for reference).

Kind regards,

Robert