[EAS] [sbe-eas] Is IPAWS down?

[Harold Price]

As we saw in the official notice from the IPAWS office, the IPAWS 
server had an unplanned outage today.

 From the point of view of an ENDEC, you can get a strong, but not 
foolproof, indication that the problem is not your local network or ENDEC.

Look at the Wget Log.  I've been seeing:

1) HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 504 Gateway Timeout
2) HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 503 Service Unavailable.

504 could be your local proxy, but most of you don't have an HTTPS 
proxy.  In this case, both of these errors originated close to, or 
at, the FEMA IPAWS server.  There is no action you can take locally 
to fix the problem.

The ENDEC will send EMAIL and blink its front panel Automatic light 
after getting several failed poll attempts in a row.  It will send 
email and turn off the blinking light after getting several successes 
in a row.  This is to reduce the number of messages you get if the 
server bounces up and down.

You can get more immediate feedback from the IPAWS stats display on 
the tools page:, for example, you'll see something like this in the 
IPAWS stats page:

Last successful poll  : 5 minutes ago, Mon Aug  6 17:00:57 2012
Last failed poll      : 0 minutes ago, Mon Aug  6 17:05:58 2012

This shows that worked a few minutes ago, but missed the most recent poll.

If the problem is with your local network, you'll see different types 
of errors, and in particular you usually won't see "HTTP request 
sent, awaiting response".  You will see a failure to connect instead 
- it won't get far enough to try to send a request.  If you don't get 
an IP address and a connecting message, you usually have a DNS 
problem.  If you get an IP address but can't get connected, you 
usually have a gateway, router, or firewall problem.

This is the first outage of the public feed I've been aware of, and 
I'm sure something has been learned as a result of it.

One suggestion would be to have a status site (hosted by a different 
server) that would allow all of us to have a place to check on the 
current IPAWS server status, so we don't generate all the phone calls 
and emails this small outage caused.

Harold