Building dedicated server for WD

Hi, I’m going to be building a dedicated weather station PC, and need some advice from someone who’s already done this. There are so many options out there for this project.

One of my biggest concerns is how I’m going to transfer all of my current weather station data from my Ubuntu Linux server over to the new Windows-based system running IIS, PHP, MySQL and the WD software. I’m sure Brian has a video on how to transfer data to another system, but I have to go look.

The reason I want to do this is so that finally I can get my existing web server off of my workstation running VMWare and have my workstation dedicated to whatever I want to use it for, and have a separate server for all of my web stuff and weather station. Kind of like a “set-it-and-forget-it” kind of setup. I’m hoping this is doable, but it’s going to take a lot of time to get it all set up and running.

A work colleague of mine has graciously donated a complete mITX system, but all I need is a hard drive or SSD and a couple gigs of RAM. Isn’t he nice? :slight_smile: How much drive space will 3-6 years of WD data take up? It’s hard to say since I’ve only had my current system running for 5 months. SSD drives that I’ve looked at on online computer parts retailers, are only about 250 GB at max. capacity. I’m just hoping that down the line this will be enough space.

This is all very exciting and challenging – and I love a good challenge!

Any advice would be most welcome!

Dan

My one biggest piece of advice, run Apache, not IIS :wink:

So you can run Apache on a Windows 7 PC? I never thought about doing that. I am familiar with Apache now as it’s running on my Linux server so I suppose it wouldn’t be that much of a transition.

What’s wrong with IIS?

Is there a non-Windows based version of Weather Display that I could run on a Linux with GUI? I don’t have a Raspberry PI, but I see there is support for that here, too.

there is, see the Linux section of the forum

Thank you Brian, I’m very much intrigued now, to learn that I do not have to have a RasPI to run WD on a Linux system! I wish I’d known this before I started with my current setup! :smiley:

Man, I am never going to get out of this computer chair!!!

Yes, for instance xampp has a windows package.

What's wrong with IIS?

Absolutely nothing, it has a big share of the webserver market. But you wrote:

One of my biggest concerns is how I'm going to transfer all of my current weather station data from my Ubuntu Linux server over to the new Windows-based system running IIS

so it would simplify that transition. Also there is a wealth of php/AJAX/wxsite on apache experience available to you, but very little on IIS.

I would go ha resonable cpu, 4gb minimum and the biggest hdd you can afford, i.e. 1tb after all, you are now saving daily video.
the logfiles dont really take up a lot nor do the graphs but over time they will.
If you have WD doing a lot, such as the web cam streaming, video creation, many of the graphs and image creations
and also the specal file conversions such as testtags etc with anything less than 4gb will cause WD to lag a bit at the
top of the minute, i have all the above except for streaming running and i only have 2gb and WD lags at the top of the
minute for up to 16 seconds, deffo need more ram because during that time WD is unusable, i.e. not responding

This is in no way a slate of WD, its due to what i have running in WD and and not high enough specs to cope is all…

I’ve used multiple machines over the years for my main server which also handles weather stuff. I’m quite fond of my current machine.

The total disk space used is 4.61GB for my current weather partition. This includes WD itself, my site files, WD backups, downloads (WD updates and the like) as well as my archives for my old CW numbers that go back to April 2009. All my stuff (C: system OS, D: network services, & E: weather) fit on a 36GB SCSI disk for a number of years, but I didn’t have or work with any videos. As far as SSD, WD and all these programs make lot of writes which SSDs having a write lifetime you’ll have to keep track of the wear leveling and migrate to another disk as its life nears its end which could be several years out.

Yes, you can run apache on windows. I did it for 4 years and hosted 3 different domains using the server from my house (not recommended). If you must run IIS and this machine is accessible from anywhere on the internet, you best make sure you keep it patched. IIS is a popular service to get probed and/or hacked.

Thanks all for your input. It’s helping me make my decisions. Last night I set up the Linux version of WD on Ubuntu Server with ubuntu-desktop, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, and Webmin installed and so far I like what I see. Although in that kind of environment WD isn’t as “pretty” as it is in Windows. I’ll try all of this with a Windows virtual box and see if it makes any difference.

Since you are starting fresh you might want to use MariaDB instead of MySQL :slight_smile:

Hi all, it’s been awhile since I posted here, because I’ve been busy setting up my new dedicated station hardware and software. My server is built, and I have decided to keep using PHP and MySQL, but this time is running in IIS on Windows Server 2012 R2. I had a heck of a time trying to get PHP working! Everything I tried failed, and I followed the instructions on every website I went to for help, and still had a problem. Well, as it turns out, I mistakenly named my php.ini file wrong - it was “pnp.ini” and of course this is not right, but I didn’t catch it until way later. I guess I must have overlooked the fact that I entered an “n” instead of an “h” in the name of the file when I renamed it.

IIS was also a bit of a challenge. Permissions are quite a bit different than Linux, but I think I can work with what Windows offers, as long as I don’t give out too much authority. A couple of my sites won’t run properly with Read-only access, it must be set to “modify”. When I was setting up IIS, I couldn’t get any of my PHP pages to show in the browser - it would only show me the PHP code, but this was eventually fixed by adding the MS Visual C++ Redistributable package and the .NET infrastructure files. The first several times I tried to install the C++ Redistributable package, it failed and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually I found an MS site to download an older version, and that one worked, so now everything has been tied up nicely and is all working together in glorious harmony.

For Weather-Display, I exported my Registry settings and imported them into my new server, then installed WD and copied over all of the folders and data, and set up SFTP to transfer all of the files generated by WD, but then I realized I may not need an SFTP server, because it just dawned on me that I can just set WD to save everything locally, unlike my old Windows/Linux virtual box combination. But it might be nice to have an SFTP server in case I need to access something remotely like from my office.

I decided I’m not going to use this server just for WD - I’m going to make it a web server for all of the web projects I’m working on, such as Ampache for streaming some of my audio, and SAM Broadcaster to get my old radio station up and running again, copied over my genealogy site, and I set up a sandbox Joomla site to do some testing on, and transferred over all of my other websites and galleries to the new web server. I’m having a problem here though because a couple of my sites display Error 500 messages when I click on certain links to PHP files, and I have to figure out why. MS calls this a “general failure” without giving an explanation of what it is that went wrong. I have a feeling that I’ll have to start from scratch on those sites, because after I installed my Sandbox site, everything worked flawlessly on that, no matter what PHP links I clicked on.

The web server isn’t on the Internet yet, it’s only running locally on an internal IP address. I bought myself a 1 TB hard drive, so I have tons of space to all of the projects I want to do. Now I just have to find the time to do it.

Once I find a permanent place to put my server, I’ll be changing my router to open all the ports on the new server. Nobody will ever know that my sites will be running on Windows. Hopefully this will all go without a hitch.

If anyone else is trying to do something similar to what I’m doing, please contact me, because maybe I can offer you some help if you’re having problems.

Cheers,
Dan

If you are going to open all the ports to the internet. Keep the machine patched 100% and keep on top of all security advisories for all of your applications or your server will be hacked. Unless if you’ve modified the server signature explicitly within the server software (dont know if you can do that with IIS), people or bots will find out you are running windows, but viruses and bots will hit your server regardless of OS looking for holes. There are windows bots as much as there are linux bots. Ideally, all ports except those you are using should be closed.

If you already know this information, great! I see too many people starting servers thinking its all fun and games and is a set-it and forget-it hobby only to wonder why their server is “acting funny” after a day or two.