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Alphanumeric Password Format

Posted: Wed 18 Oct 2017 4:13 pm
by mhpaulson
For the past month or so, my weather station has mysteriously not been reporting to Weather Underground. Off and on during that period, I've been trying to troubleshoot the issue and finally discovered and corrected the problem this AM. I didn't connect the two but now, after the fact, I see what happened. Back in September I changed my WU password and then went into my Cumulus Configuration and entered the new password there. For security reasons, my new password contained a plus symbol (+) and an equals symbol (=). After looking at the debug file this morning and noticing that Cumulus was reporting an incorrect password and/or ID, I went back into WU and changed the PW again, this time with all alphanumeric characters, removing the + and the = symbols. Sure enough, after changing the PW in Cumulus to the new alphanumeric one, my station started reporting to WU immediately. Apparently, Cumulus doesn't support non-alphanumeric characters in its Passwords. Just a word to the wise, I guess.

Re: Alphanumeric Password Format

Posted: Wed 18 Oct 2017 6:16 pm
by steve
Yes, I've seen this before, but it's not mentioned in the FAQ unfortunately. It's something to do with the way the WU update URL is encoded.

Re: Alphanumeric Password Format

Posted: Wed 18 Oct 2017 10:03 pm
by mhpaulson
Thanks for the reply, Steve.
So, it's not a Cumulus-specific issue, something on WU's end. Interesting. It would be nice if the password format info could be documented somehow so that others don't run into the same problem. Oh, well.

Re: Alphanumeric Password Format

Posted: Thu 19 Oct 2017 6:45 am
by sfws
If you look up the official URL specification both '+' and '=' each have a specific defined meaning as separators and are therefore not a permitted character elsewhere like in your password. Consequently, the problem is simply in the protocol for transport between Cumulus and WU, not either end's fault. Help fora on the internet reveal that others have met up with this issue, so you are not the first to say it should be documented somewhere - it is in the specification for a URL. FWIW this dates from the Berners-Lee original ideas.

Re: Alphanumeric Password Format

Posted: Thu 19 Oct 2017 10:47 am
by steve
I wasn’t clear - I’m not saying that the problem definitely isn’t with Cumulus, it could well be that Cumulus should be encoding the password such that the reserved characters work OK. I can’t remember exactly what the code does.

Re: Alphanumeric Password Format

Posted: Fri 20 Oct 2017 1:28 pm
by mcrossley
From what I can see MX doesn't do a HttpUtility.UrlEncode() of the url string that is generated, so probably the same for C1?