This section of the network will guide you to access the online data of IVAN.
The data includes Network Servers details, Voice Servers details, and a listing of connected Pilots and ATC users.
An explicit written permission from the IVAO Logistics is required.
Permission will only be granted to:
The data provided by IVAO are snapshots of the network, computed every X minutes. To access the data, you need to download some files:
The first one is:
http://www.ivao.aero/whazzup/status.txt
The file status.txt contains some general settings, and must be downloaded ONE TIME ONLY, when your application starts.
If you use a server to download these data (for example an ASP or CGI application running on a web server) you should download the status.txt file ONCE A DAY, store it locally, and then use the local copy for your server application use.
You better also store a local copy of this file, so you can use in its data, in case the main web-server is down.
The file network-data.txt contains all data related to all clients connected to the IVAO network, and is stored into different locations, whose addresses are shown into status.txt file.
To balance the load between servers, you need to retrieve the network-data.txt from a different location every time you download it, choosing a location RANDOMLY between locations stored into status.txt file.
The file network-data.txt is updated every X minutes, as shown by the RELOAD directive. You can download it at a time interval agreed with the IVAO-NA, obviously it's useless to download it with an interval that is less than the value of the RELOAD directive.
All files are in pure ascii format, with one record per row. Each record ends with a carriage return+line feed couple, each field is variable length and fields are separated by ":" character (without quotes). Also the last field is followed by a : character.
Comments start with the ";" character (without quotes).
IMPORTANT NOTE: It could happen that the network-data.txt file doesn't exist when you try to download it. This could happen because the data server that generates this file uploads it into a temporary file, then delete the old network-data.txt file, and then rename the temporary file to network-data.txt. So, if you try to download the file after it has been deleted and before it has been renamed (a little seconds time), you can get a file not found http error. Your application should treat this case accordingly by retrying the download.
You are welcome to read these data files for your applications and tools. We only ask you to fully implement the load balance mechanism to download data as described, so that we can split load between more mirrored servers.
Thank you and enjoy! :-)