Fwd: Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> -----
From: Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:47:44 +0900 Subject: [IP] Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data The National Weather Service is proposing to place limits on accessing its life-saving weather data in a bid to fix Internet outages. By Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/09/nws-data-limits-internet-b...
[snip] This seems like a problem that this group could solve rather rapidly with minimal incremental expense. It also seems like one that's very much worth solving. ---rsk
Something is stupidly wrong here. From a non-paywallled article (WaPo blocks me from reading its content): https://newsbeezer.com/aus/the-national-weather-service-is-facing-a-lack-of-... ——— The weather service hosted a public forum on Tuesday to discuss the proposal and answer questions. When asked about the computer infrastructure investments that would be required to keep these limits off, agency officials said a one-time cost of approximately $ 1.5 million could prevent interest rate restrictions. The NOAA budget for fiscal 2020 was $ 5.4 billion. However, Buchanan stated that the real cost of solving the problem would be higher since the $ 1.5 million would “be just one component of a multi-faceted solution.” Forum officials also said that management of the weather service was aware of the relatively low cost of solving the problem, but that the agency was facing “competing priorities”. Buchanan said that dissemination of data is a priority for the weather service’s leadership, but that it is “continually” weighed against others. When asked if Congress was aware of the agency’s data dissemination challenges, forum officials said they did not know. Senator Maria Cantwell (Washington), a Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees NOAA, said a request to upgrade the weather service’s computer infrastructure would likely receive non-partisan support. ———- This is either some kind of bizarre political maneuver, or bureaucrats at NWS need to be seriously fired and replaced with competent people who‘s tech jobs have been waylaid by Covid. Obviously it’s a trivial task to fix delivery capacity, if it will only cost $1.5 million to an agency with a $5.4 billion budget. And how does a 2000-employee agency blow through $5.4 billion a year anyway? This stinks to high heaven. -mel via cell On Dec 10, 2020, at 12:15 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> wrote: Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
I've got plenty of spare capacity in Kenya - I can give them a couple of Gbps for just US$1,000/month :-). _classic_ Mark. On 12/10/20 15:27, Mel Beckman wrote:
Something is stupidly wrong here. From a non-paywallled article (WaPo blocks me from reading its content):
https://newsbeezer.com/aus/the-national-weather-service-is-facing-a-lack-of-... <https://newsbeezer.com/aus/the-national-weather-service-is-facing-a-lack-of-internet-bandwidth-and-is-proposing-access-restrictions/>
———
The weather service hosted a public forum on Tuesday to discuss the proposal and answer questions. When asked about the computer infrastructure investments that would be required to keep these limits off, agency officials said a one-time cost of approximately $ 1.5 million could prevent interest rate restrictions. The NOAA budget for fiscal 2020 was $ 5.4 billion.
However, Buchanan stated that the real cost of solving the problem would be higher since the $ 1.5 million would “be just one component of a multi-faceted solution.”
Forum officials also said that management of the weather service was aware of the relatively low cost of solving the problem, but that the agency was facing “competing priorities”.
Buchanan said that dissemination of data is a priority for the weather service’s leadership, but that it is “continually” weighed against others.
When asked if Congress was aware of the agency’s data dissemination challenges, forum officials said they did not know.
Senator Maria Cantwell (Washington), a Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees NOAA, said a request to upgrade the weather service’s computer infrastructure would likely receive non-partisan support.
———-
This is either some kind of bizarre political maneuver, or bureaucrats at NWS need to be seriously fired and replaced with competent people who‘s tech jobs have been waylaid by Covid.
Obviously it’s a trivial task to fix delivery capacity, if it will only cost $1.5 million to an agency with a $5.4 */billion/* budget. And how does a 2000-employee agency blow through $5.4 billion a year anyway?
This stinks to high heaven.
-mel via cell
On Dec 10, 2020, at 12:15 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> wrote:
Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
On Dec 10, 2020, at 7:27 AM, Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org> wrote:
This is either some kind of bizarre political maneuver, or bureaucrats at NWS need to be seriously fired and replaced with competent people who‘s tech jobs have been waylaid by Covid.
Not bizarre at all. NWS directly competes with AccuWeather. AccuWeather has plenty of lobbyists and bipartisan political support. Anything that harms NWS helps AccuWeather. This is why a former CEO of AccuWeather almost became the head of the NWS for the specific purpose of ensuring it a ceased to be a threat to AccuWeather.
In article <E70F542C-7C91-4CC8-B33C-AB148C7D1950@humancapitaldev.com> you write:
On Dec 10, 2020, at 7:27 AM, Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org> wrote:
This is either some kind of bizarre political maneuver, or bureaucrats at NWS need to be seriously fired and replaced with competent people who‘s tech jobs have been waylaid by Covid.
Not bizarre at all. NWS directly competes with AccuWeather. AccuWeather has plenty of lobbyists and bipartisan political support. Anything that harms NWS helps AccuWeather.
It's more complicated than that. Accuweather like every commerical weather forecaster gets most of its data from the NWS, then uses its own methods to make their forecasts. So they want to cripple the front end of the NWS but not the data gathering back end. But I do agree that this problem sounds like one that could be solved with a couple of phone calls to Cloudflare or Akamai and very little money. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
-----Original Message----- From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+kmedcalf=dessus.com@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Rich Kulawiec Sent: Thursday, 10 December, 2020 01:13 To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Fwd: Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage,
Simply get rid of the gigabytes of JavaScript and stupidly designed crap and hire someone who knows what they are doing and a bandwidth DOWNGRADE will be in order. The root cause is incompetence and it can be fixed by getting rid of all the children and hiring someone who knows what they are doing. -- Be decisive. Make a decision, right or wrong. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who could not make a decision. proposes
limiting key data
----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> -----
From: Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:47:44 +0900 Subject: [IP] Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data The National Weather Service is proposing to place limits on accessing its life-saving weather data in a bid to fix Internet outages. By Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/09/nws-data-limits- internet-bandwidth/
[snip]
This seems like a problem that this group could solve rather rapidly with minimal incremental expense. It also seems like one that's very much worth solving.
---rsk
I would say it's likely much larger. https://twitter.com/CoasterBGW/status/1336387160220569603/photo/1 Their design is to run everything from one datacenter? I am enjoying the level of irony that the rest of us consider catastrophic weather events in our datacenter planning, but the NWS does not. I'm sure like most things with technology and government it's less about desire and more about politics of proper funding. On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 9:40 AM Keith Medcalf <kmedcalf@dessus.com> wrote:
Simply get rid of the gigabytes of JavaScript and stupidly designed crap and hire someone who knows what they are doing and a bandwidth DOWNGRADE will be in order. The root cause is incompetence and it can be fixed by getting rid of all the children and hiring someone who knows what they are doing.
-- Be decisive. Make a decision, right or wrong. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who could not make a decision.
-----Original Message----- From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+kmedcalf=dessus.com@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Rich Kulawiec Sent: Thursday, 10 December, 2020 01:13 To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Fwd: Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> -----
From: Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:47:44 +0900 Subject: [IP] Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data The National Weather Service is proposing to place limits on accessing its life-saving weather data in a bid to fix Internet outages. By Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/09/nws-data-limits- internet-bandwidth/
[snip]
This seems like a problem that this group could solve rather rapidly with minimal incremental expense. It also seems like one that's very much worth solving.
---rsk
On Dec 10, 2020, at 9:39 AM, Keith Medcalf <kmedcalf@dessus.com> wrote:
Simply get rid of the gigabytes of JavaScript and stupidly designed crap and hire someone who knows what they are doing and a bandwidth DOWNGRADE will be in order. The root cause is incompetence and it can be fixed by getting rid of all the children and hiring someone who knows what they are doing.
If the only problem was bandwidth it would be easy to solve. I miss weather underground before it became slow as molasses with openstreetmap and other things. Then again, it used to be a local telephone call and typing UM-WEATHER at the which host? prompt - Jared
On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 09:48:25AM -0500, Jared Mauch wrote:
I miss weather underground before it became slow as molasses with openstreetmap and other things.
As do I, and the demise of uswx.com took away one of the alternatives. I spent some time earlier this year unsuccessfully trying to contact the people behind uswx.com in the hopes of restarting it as a very lightweight site that could be read in a text-only web browser *and* scripted -- since I think it would be handy to be have a weather site that could easily be scraped for custom uses such as "cron job that sends me a brief 3-day forecast for locations X Y Z every day at 6 AM". ---rsk
Rich Kulawiec wrote:
----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> -----
From: Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:47:44 +0900 Subject: [IP] Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data The National Weather Service is proposing to place limits on accessing its life-saving weather data in a bid to fix Internet outages. By Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/09/nws-data-limits-internet-b... [snip]
This seems like a problem that this group could solve rather rapidly with minimal incremental expense. It also seems like one that's very much worth solving.
High resolution images, lots of users, lots of reps per minute - sounds like a budgetary problem to me. Yup, limiting refreshes doesn't seem unreasonable - pending some serious redesign of their content delivery network. Meanwhile, remember that these folks are seeing serious political efforts to limit things like climate modeling - so some of this might be information suppression through resource starvation. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 12:14 AM Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> wrote:
Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data The National Weather Service is proposing to place limits on accessing its life-saving weather data in a bid to fix Internet outages. By Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/09/nws-data-limits-internet-b...
This seems like a problem that this group could solve rather rapidly with minimal incremental expense. It also seems like one that's very much worth solving.
If I had to venture a guess, it's not a network problem it's a web server problem. It's far too easy to design a web server where each request consumes 10 to 100 times the processing that it absolutely needs to, often with database bottlenecks that further constrain scalability. Put such a system under broad load and of course it collapses. Regards, Bill Herrin -- Hire me! https://bill.herrin.us/resume/
participants (10)
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Daniel Seagraves -
Jared Mauch -
John Levine -
Keith Medcalf -
Mark Tinka -
Mel Beckman -
Miles Fidelman -
Rich Kulawiec -
Tom Beecher -
William Herrin