GeoNames Forum

I have enabled ws.geonames.org again to try something. But the result is the same and the server was no longer able accept connections, so I have disabled it again.

ws5.geonames.org will remain active for at least a couple of weeks, so you have time to switch back, but it will not be a permanent option.

Marc

Mark,

First of all: thank you for what you are doing! I don't think we say it enough but if the service goes down you notice how many people depends on this great initiative. Thank you for the hard work!

Now, is it possible to return a status code like "503 Service Unavailable"? I'm modifying my client program to check for ws.geonames.org and if not found to check ws5.geonames.org. It's an installed application so I can't just switch the URL when everything works again. The result is I need to query ws.geonames.org and wait for the timeout before I can check ws5.geonames.org. A decent status code would make it faster to detect the problem reducing the load for all those queries that are waiting for a timeout.

Just an idea...

Cimm, when you are under attack you can't return anything, including 503

Marc, thanks for the great service. I just sent a small donation through Paypal. Suggest others do the same.

Marc, the iPhone SDK sends along the application name in the referer. Any chance you can just block iMob?

I also use GeoNames in my iPhone app. This will affect a lot of other iPhone apps too.

I just blogged about this
http://peter.boctor.net/2009/01/22/imob-brings-down-geonames-other-iphone-apps/

Thank You,
Peter
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pboctor,

Until Marc responds, let me toss in my 2 cents. When the server is overloaded there is no way you can do ANYTHING. That is, no referer checking, absolutely nothing. It is bogged down and doesn't respond. So, the only solution is to change URL which is what Marc did.

The first I have tried was to block the requests with the user agent, but this did not make a difference. There were simply too many requests.
Don't forget the server is usually very busy answering valid requests and has not enough spare power for hundreds or thousands of additional requests per second, even if most of them should just be rejected.

Marc

Would just like to say thanks Marc for doing this.

I was in a big dilemma figuring out if my code suddenly had a bug. Then read this forum and saw the problem with the IPhone application and what you have done about it. Thanks very much.

IMOB seems an apt name

All the best,
Graham

So they released iMob 1.0.1 yesterday. Any word on whether this update helps GeoNames?

Thanks,
Peter

Just hope that imob 1.0.1 did not direct request to ws5.
This could be a serious problem.
No way to block them because they send requests directly from iphone...too many... I'm just writing a bad review to imob on the app store.

Marc, one question: I would like to switch on a price based solution with geonames. Now I think this will be a win win solution only if I will have a dedicated dns. Is it possible?

Thanks again,
dario

The imob developers have confirmed that the service will be removed from the new version that is waiting for approval by apple. I assume they mean version 1.02, but I have not yet got a confirmation.

Dario: yes it is possible to get a separate subdomain for the commercial web services.

Best

Marc

The call to geonames has been removed from the iMob application and we have brought back the domain ws.geonames.org.

Sorry for all the troubles.

Marc

Thank you Marc, ws.geonames.org now works.
I will contact you about the commercial version.
Please remember to keep alive for a couple of weeks ws5.

dario

Hi Marc,All
it seems that ws5 is slow and sometimes down (while ws is ok).
Anybody is experiencing the same problem?

dario

I can confirm that both ws5.geonames.org and ws.geonames.org are degrading right now and the traffic by the iMob application is increasing steadily. It seems the kids in the US are getting up now and many of them have not yet upgraded to the newest release without the call to GeoNames. Let's hope they do it soon.

Marc

So, are we sure that imob is not using now 'ws' in release 1.0 and 'ws5' in release 1.1? Pay attention , in this case we could expect a DoS for both. That is what we can expect because not all guys from v1.0 will update to 1.1...

dario

I only see iMob 1.0 calls in the log files, no 1.1 calls.

Marc

At the moment neither ws nor ws5 works. At least there is no reaction within minutes.

http://ws5.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=27.038773&lng=33.654063&maxRows=1

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=39.70795&lng=3.46080&maxRows=1

Thanks for your service!