New Zealand Local Weather Forum
Weather Discussion => Members Websites and Weather Cams => Topic started by: TonyC on September 17, 2024, 10:26:35 PM
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Port Robinson Weather Station
It’s been a while since anyone posted anything in this section of the forum, so I thought I might recap my experiences up to the present day.
In 2005 we built a new house in a reasonably remote North Canterbury 3 acre site with the view of eventually retiring there. Originally purchased in 1989, it had an old 2 bedroom rimu cottage in a fairly derelict state. Internet was non-existent with a crackly telecom phone line.
In 2007 we managed to talk a wireless internet provider (Amuri) into covering the Port Robinson area, at which time I purchased a Fine Offset weather station and used an offshore website to publish the data. Time went by and being retired, eventually the desire to improve things led to the purchase of a Davis Vantage Pro weather station and a Synology NAS to set up my own webserver, plus adding several cameras which constitutes the present day situation.
A micro Windows10 computer (about 120mm square) with 2mb memory running only a copy of Weather Display software is connected to the Vantage Pro console through a serial/USB interface. The computer was purchased directly from China 6 years ago at just over $100. An old Acer laptop (7-8 years old) running Windows10 with ISPY software handles the two ip cameras. Both computers have drives mapped to the Web directory in the Synology NAS through the house ethernet and dump all the necessary files into it. Amazingly it has all functioned without major failures.
The Wireless internet service over the years has varied in quality. I tried Vodafone 4g for a while as an alternative, but that degraded over time. Swapping back to Amuri, they blocked port 80 outward traffic which meant no one could access the website. Eventually I solved that problem using a service from NoIp.com, namely a Dynamic DNS hostname. In practical terms the service intercepts calls to my domain name and adds a port number to it (in this case 8080). At my router, I port forwarded any calls to 8080 back to port 80 which then displays the webpage in their browser. This service costs around $20 per year
While the wireless service speed is quite adequate (around 40mbps down and 20mbps up), my curiosity about the new Starlink home service for the same monthly price has finally led me to giving it a go. The price of the equipment will put many off, but it is easy to set up for a standard household and the monthly $79.95 is comparable to many providers. Being in an isolated area, there is probably not much load on the system and I am getting speeds of 350mbps down and 40mbps up.
HOWEVER, if you intend connecting equipment such as a NAS webserver, beware, there are many pitfalls to overcome.
Starlink uses CGNAT which in practical terms means you share an ip number with several other users. The Internet Domain Name system has relied on each connection to have a unique IPV4 address as to where to route the traffic to and from, so this becomes a problem!
The router that is provided with Starlink does not allow port forwarding, but it does have a bypass mode which allows you to connect your own router which in effect delegates the Starlink router to just a gateway and if you need to port forward you can set it on your own router. The lack of an IPv4 address however remains a problem.
Whilst keeping my existing Weather station/Webserver system operating on the Wireless internet, I’ve been experimenting duplicating it through Starlink, using a spare (earlier model) Synology NAS. After much googling I finally discovered a free service called Cloudflare Tunnels.
To set this up I purchased a domain name from Namecheap for a couple of dollars (portrob.online). You then set up an account with Cloudfare.com, register the new domain name with them and change the dns server addresses to Cloudflare ones. After that, you install the Cloudflare service on your NAS so that they can make contact with each other via IPv6. This took a lot of trial and error, but was finally achieved. Next problem……….
My Weather Station website is highly dynamic. Photos update every 60 seconds and other files update every 5 minutes. I found that despite clearing my browser cache frequently when viewing the page, updates were not showing up. After mulling this over I finally suspected maybe Cloudflare was caching the pages….. back to google…. Finally I discovered that you had to set up a rule within Cloudflare to prevent either the whole site from caching, or alternatively various pages. After setting up a rule for the former, voila, problem solved!
Having two different internet providers does have a certain appeal in this uncertain world. The house has a 7.5kw petrol emergency generator and an independent water supply, so in the event of a major calamity one could survive for some time (until the fuel ran out) and remain connected to the rest of the world. Time will tell whether I keep them both going.
Whether any of the above is useful knowledge, who knows, but it might perhaps it might provide a few clues to anyone traversing down the same path.