vB Weather Mk. 2

This is a post of a much-revised hack originally posted (by myself) here. I am posting this as a new hack because MSNBC, who the raw weather data is provided through, has changed their source provider (from AccuWeather to The Weather Channel), which required a retooling of the data parsing code, as well as completely new databases. I have also made obsolete the weather_functions.php file, moving the functions to admin/functions.php, simplifying the ability to show current weather data on any page (if desired). Finally, in what I'm sure will be welcome news to many people who have installed the original, I've completely rewritten the instructions, making them, as far as I can tell, much simpler.

If you are unfamiliar with the original: This hack provides current weather conditions and a five-day forecast to your members. Each member can select from over 34,000 cities, by narrowing down from region (like continents), country, and subdivision (like states). Each member can also select to see temperatures in Fahrenheit or Celsius, as well as metric or standard measurements for the other data.

A demo is available on my test board: http://www.jjr512.com/testboard/. I have set up an account for anyone to use to test it out (username: test; pw: test). If you are not logged in, you will see default weather on the home page (default is set to New York City), and cannot change settings (I forget if you can view a detailed forecast, though; you may be able to). If you do log in, you can change the settings for the test account, to see how it works.

***
If you have installed any previous version, you should completely uninstall it. Read the instructions and work backwards from there: Delete all templates added, remove changes to any existing templates (I forget if there were any or not), delete all new tables from the database, delete all new files added by the old hack. All have been changed to some extent, some more than others, and it would be easier to work from a clean slate. Especially since some of the template names have changes, so if you don't delete the old ones, they'll just be sitting there doing nothing at all. It is also vitally important to delete (or "drop") the tables--I believe there were six--you added for the original version. The new ones have different data and, for some, a different structure, so do not just empty them. Remove them totally.

Good luck!

Change Log
v1.1a: Current Version: Corrects a small error where an incorrect variable was used in the code to show the local time of the last update. If you already have v1.1, you only need to do the fix described in Post #82 below.
v1.1: Changes display of last update time to be the correct time in the user's own local time zone; previously, it was always Eastern Time (GMT-5) (Upgrade instructions are in Post #79 below). Also breaks the weather_city.sql into six smaller pieces (useful only to new installations; existing installations need not worry about this).
v1.0a: Adds instructions on how to add location to current weather on forums home page (changes to code added to index.php and forumhome_weather template).
v1.0: Original Release

[replicon]

Wow. I didn't think there were so many people having problems with this. I have a fix for pretty much everything that's mentioned in this thread, lag, weather not working, blank page... . Here's the technical description of what happened and why.

I stumbled upon the lag issue on the main page a few months back. It was fairly rare, approx. 5% of the hits to the main page which had the weather it would basically hang php completely affecting all the PHP pages on the server anytime someone checked the weather or hit the main page. It progressively got worse and worse. Like most of you guys, I took out the weather from the main page as a quick fix.

I pulled up a network sniffer to see what was going on between PHP and msnbc (which hosts the weather component). I noticed that sometimes it'd hit an IIS5 server, and sometimes, it'd hit an IIS6 server, which would hang the page. Looks like they were slowly rolling out Windows 2003 servers to their msnbc web server clusters, and whenver PHP requests the weather from the component and it (randomly) went to an upgraded IIS6/Win2K3 server, it'd hang.

Used my browser (IE) to hit the weather component page, and sniffed those packets. Works fine on IIS5 and IIS6. Compared the packets and noticed the difference. The vbWeather script was terminiating the request with 2 LF's (\n). IE terminated the requests with 2 CRLF's (\r\n). The HTTP standard defines the sequence CR LF as the end-of-line marker for all protocol elements except the entity-body. Meaning there was a bug in the weather.php code, which was allowed in IIS5, but because IIS6 is much stricter in RFC compliance, it sat there waiting for a proper end of line, which it never receives, so it just hangs there and does nothing.

OK there's the geeky tech description. Here's the fix.

In all your php files that access the weather, replace the line:

fputs($rawdata,"GET /m/chnk/d/weather_d_src.asp?acid=$usersettings[accid] HTTP/1.0\n\n");

with:

fputs($rawdata,"GET /m/chnk/d/weather_d_src.asp?acid=$usersettings[accid] HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n");

And your weather will be back up and running.

Here's the link to my site. Click F5 to refresh as much as you want, it'll never hang .

Beyond Car Forums

Enjoy.

[indiamike]

Most excellent!!!!!


Thanks for the fix.

[Zhin Jio]

Instantaneous fix. Thank you so so much for posting that info. I don't have to ditch this very cool hack now.

- ZJ

[White Knight]

Originally Posted by replicon

Wow. I didn't think there were so many people having problems with this. I have a fix for pretty much everything that's mentioned in this thread, lag, weather not working, blank page... . Here's the technical description of what happened and why.

I stumbled upon the lag issue on the main page a few months back. It was fairly rare, approx. 5% of the hits to the main page which had the weather it would basically hang php completely affecting all the PHP pages on the server anytime someone checked the weather or hit the main page. It progressively got worse and worse. Like most of you guys, I took out the weather from the main page as a quick fix.

I pulled up a network sniffer to see what was going on between PHP and msnbc (which hosts the weather component). I noticed that sometimes it'd hit an IIS5 server, and sometimes, it'd hit an IIS6 server, which would hang the page. Looks like they were slowly rolling out Windows 2003 servers to their msnbc web server clusters, and whenver PHP requests the weather from the component and it (randomly) went to an upgraded IIS6/Win2K3 server, it'd hang.

Used my browser (IE) to hit the weather component page, and sniffed those packets. Works fine on IIS5 and IIS6. Compared the packets and noticed the difference. The vbWeather script was terminiating the request with 2 LF's (\n). IE terminated the requests with 2 CRLF's (\r\n). The HTTP standard defines the sequence CR LF as the end-of-line marker for all protocol elements except the entity-body. Meaning there was a bug in the weather.php code, which was allowed in IIS5, but because IIS6 is much stricter in RFC compliance, it sat there waiting for a proper end of line, which it never receives, so it just hangs there and does nothing.

OK there's the geeky tech description. Here's the fix.

In all your php files that access the weather, replace the line:

fputs($rawdata,"GET /m/chnk/d/weather_d_src.asp?acid=$usersettings[accid] HTTP/1.0\n\n");

with:

fputs($rawdata,"GET /m/chnk/d/weather_d_src.asp?acid=$usersettings[accid] HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n");

And your weather will be back up and running.

Here's the link to my site. Click F5 to refresh as much as you want, it'll never hang .

Beyond Car Forums

Enjoy.

Great Job! Works very well!