Dear Testmatch and WeatherCat victims of Murphy's law while vacationing.
I don't normally spend more than a few nights at a time away from home, so my network is usually locked down to prevent external access. However I'm away until the end of this week and forgot to enable remote access to the Mac Mini running WC before leaving home. You can probably guess the rest...
Actually, you can infer the rest . . . . using Murphy's law . . .
WC emailed me on Friday saying there'd been a 'Sensor failure at sample time' followed by another message to say 'Comms reset successful'.
. . .
. I'm also getting an email every 30 minutes saying WC 'appears to have hung: rebooting as a precautionary measure'.
If you are getting that email, it sure suggests that WeatherCat is already trying to reboot itself automatically. So this probably is a more serious problem than easy access to WeatherCat would solve. It might have been possible to solve the problem by rebooting the Mac itself. However, the sensor and communication errors suggest there may be other issues involved. Indeed, you gave yourself trouble by not giving yourself access to your network, but even if you had that, there still might not be anything you could do remotely. After all, Murphy is sometimes extremely thorough . . . .
Short of driving back home and restarting WC (or more realistically, waiting until the end of the week when we return from holiday) is there anything I can do?
Perhaps Stu will have an idea, but that sure looks like Murphy really got you.
If not, might adding that to the WC Client (or to a password-protected remote emergency restart application) be reasonable, and useful?
If you are getting the emails, odds are that the watchdog application is at least trying to launch WeatherCat. One possible explanation is that you have a problem with your station and WeatherCat is hanging up waiting for the station to become live. You'll have to see if others think the remote reboot option is interesting, but I think in your case it wouldn't have helped anyway.
Sorry, bad things happen to good weather stations . . .
Edouard