Well it happened. Our servers for Power Plants that offer ready access to performance data, scheduling, zone naming, etc. has given up the ghost and we’ve had to shut 'er down. Probably be done for some time as we rebuild it as well as rebuild the programming that operates it.
With more than 1,000 queries from Power Plants each second, 24 hours a day, from all over the world, it just got to be too much. So now we’re rolling our programming sleeves up and redesigning the back end of PowerPlay and new servers to accommodate. This will not detract from the current workload of DMP or the server (we have multiple programmers )
What this means is fairly simple. Long time performance data and logging will be gone until the new servers are online. Also, scheduling is gone as well. Those said, everything else will be available locally. You can access the Power Plant’s internal webpage by simply typing in the Power Plant’s IP address. Once there you can name your zones, turn on and off zones.
Performance will be unaffected. If you need instructions how to access the internal web control page go here: http://powerplay.psaudio.com/ and you’ll see instructions.
We hope to have PowerPlay back up and running sometime in September.
Thanks, Elk. Always a head hanger when we have to do something drastic like that but better to catch it quick and bite the bullet than to have it cascading down upon you as it crumbles. At least this way it’s an orderly process that we can manage.
Just a quick note for anybody needing remote control from outside their local network: you can use a tool such as Teamviewer, Anydesk, or any of quite a few others to remote-control a local PC, then just follow the instructions above and it will work fine. I am currently using Anydesk. (Thankfully I don’t rely on the scheduling and performance monitoring features though I do log in to check the incoming AC voltages in the house.)
I’ve built a few server farms too, strongly suggest virtualizing it, consider Docker too. Host it in AWS and scale it up or down as needed, even geolocate several around the globe.
Any thought on reworking the PowerPlay app to make it a client server model so that we can run it all local? This would remove the need for PSAudio to run a server farm just to give us our power stats. Although I’ve used your work around to direct access my P12, I do miss the statistics PowerPlay provided. I would think it’s a Win-Win for PSAudio - we get our PowerPlay stats and you get freedom for having to hold all the data that goes into those stats.
I am so disappointed that I buy no more equipment before running again and considering whether I will not return my P10, on the basis of wrong marketing.
I rely on the ability to connect to my P5 and P10 (soon to be switched for a P20) a lot, as I spend a lot of time away from home and the spousal unit uses the system when I am away. What I have been doing is either VPN’ing in to my router in the house and accessing the units via a browser that way, or remote-controlling a laptop in the house and using that to access the units. I don’t rely on the stats that much so while this is an inconvenience it’s not a massive problem for me. But I can see that for others it may be. Paul & Company, what would help me in the interim is a firmware change so that turning a zone off is sticky in case the unit loses power - for some reason we lose power in anything more than a 3mph breeze sometimes, so this one change would save me the need to log in remotely to check it every few days. In any case I do feel that Globalnet is a pretty big selling point for these products and is definitely something I want to come back/continue.
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