If you wish to receive announcements about changes in data management and services you can subscribe to the Data Announcements mailing list.
The EarthScope-operated NSF National Geophysical Facility’s SeedLink streaming service, providing access to real-time streams from seismological networks, is moving from rtserve.iris.washington.edu to rtserve.earthscope.org as part of our cloud transition.
What: Transition of SeedLink service to a new address
When: June 8, 2026
Both services are now running in parallel for a transition period of approximately one month. We encourage all users to switch to rtserve.earthscope.org at their earliest convenience. On June 8, 2026, the DNS for rtserve.iris.washington.edu will be redirected to the new service, at which point any remaining client connections will be dropped and forced to reconnect to the new service.
We’ve worked to make this transition as smooth as possible, but if you encounter issues please contact help@earthscope.org.
Action required: switch your client and discard saved connection state
When you reconfigure your SeedLink client to connect to rtserve.earthscope.org, discard any saved state file used to resume connections. The new service is an independent implementation and does not share state with the legacy server. Reusing legacy state can cause re-downloading large amounts of duplicate data already received.
The recommended procedure:
- Stop your client.
- Update the server address to rtserve.earthscope.org.
- Delete or rename the existing SeedLink statefile.
- Restart your client; it will begin acquiring data from the new service from the current time.
It is possible that this transition procedure will result in data gaps in some streams, with more gaps expected the longer the switch takes. If you wish to fill these data gaps, miniSEED can be requested from our fdsnws-dataselect service: https://service.earthscope.org/fdsnws/dataselect/1/
Forced cutover
On the cutover date, the DNS record for rtserve.iris.washington.edu will be updated to resolve to rtserve.earthscope.org. Existing connections to the old address will be dropped at that time, and clients will reconnect to the new service. Because server state cannot be preserved across this cutover, users who have not already migrated should expect a small gap or some data overlap when their client reconnects. Controlling this state transition is the primary reason we recommend migrating ahead of the forced cutover.
We will update this news item and send a follow-up email to the data-announcements list when the cutover has occurred.
What’s new in the service
The new service brings several improvements:
- SeedLink v4 support. The new server supports the SeedLink v4 protocol, which provides a deeper buffer for resuming connections after disruptions and lays the groundwork for future miniSEED v3 streaming. Existing SeedLink (v3) clients remain fully supported.
- TLS on port 18500. Encrypted SeedLink connections are now supported on port 18500, per the SeedLink v4 specification. The standard unencrypted SeedLink port (18000) continues to be available.
- FDSN Source Identifiers in stream IDs. The new server uses FDSN Source Identifiers internally for stream identification. This change is transparent for normal SeedLink operation — clients continue to subscribe using station and stream IDs –— but some server status messages and INFO responses will now display stream identifiers in the FDSN Source ID form.
More details for client developers and power users
- CORS is enabled on the new service. If you are developing a browser-based client and run into cross-origin issues, please let us know.
- The new service runs on AWS infrastructure. If you have firewall rules that whitelist the legacy IP addresses, those rules will need to be updated; we recommend whitelisting by hostname where possible as a static IP is not guaranteed.
Please reach out to help@earthscope.org if you have any questions or run into trouble with this new service.