Data.sparkfun.com - HTTPS non functional (error 35)

I got in contact with someone at sparkfun about the issues our users have been having with https since late last month; their reply was that essentially, we’re pushing too much data to them and it won’t work. I’m not sure how the fact http works but https doesn’t plays into that, but that was their reply.

I’ve noted that the data volume is from hundreds of customers, not a single one. At this point, our recommendation is to use http vs https if you want to use data.sparkfun.com, and it’s possible this may stop working at any time. You may want to use an alternative phant service eg analog.io, for your projects.

Sorry, but there’s not much we can do to help here. I’ll continue to try and get them to fix their end - after all, their tutorial on using data.sparkfun.com with an imp uses https - but it’s their service in the end.

Thanks for all of your help with this. I agree that it seems odd that they are unwilling to address a problem with the setup that they themselves are recommending, but that’s beyond your control. Time to look for an alternative …

This appears to have been fixed, at least partially. I’m seeing no 35’s at the moment - most are 200 OK’s with a small number of 429 rate limited responses which may be down to individual user accounts on data.sparkfun.com.

Worth retrying!

I’m surprised that Sparkfun’s data is available to anyone to see …

Another reason to get your own webhost account and save data, do charting, do whatever you want with the data and nobody else can see your data. You do need to know some PHP scripting (and MySQLi) for database use. But for about $50-$60 per year, you can have your own online database to do whatever your heart desires, without anyone else being in control of it. And that would include your own domain name. And it includes a website you can use for other things too. If there were other imps or other people involved, you could have other people use your database if you wish. Make a connection between imps without revealing your imp URL.

If there is a need for it, or it doesn’t already exist, I could create a simple tutorial on how to use PHP on your own website to capture imp JSON data and utilize MySQLi. I would imagine there are already tutorials via Google?

I’m not plugging this webhost, but cleverdot.com still offers a special 1 year deal for a webhost and domain name ($39.95). That’s pretty cheap. After a year, let it expire, or renew for $55 for any year after. That’s less than $5 per month to have your own webhost and database, all for yourself and private. I’m sure there are other webhost deals available too. It’s really nice to have a “sandbox” of your own to play around with the imp.

For audit and abuse purposes we have an audit trail of hostnames that imp agents have made requests to (not URLs, not headers, not body data), and the HTTP response code. This is what allowed us to determine that all secure requests were failing initially.

A lot of the time people are looking to do the minimum amount of sysadmin work, which is why data.sparkfun.com, analog.io, plotly, etc are popular.

The right person from Sparkfun contacted me and this is definitely going to help. I’ve given him some more info about the traffic patterns and they’re ensuring their load balancer is appropriately set up for the volume of stuff that comes from imp developers :slight_smile: