Suddenly getting frequent disconnections on client. Any ideas?

[silkshadow]

I have a PC client that have been running SageTV untouched for probably a year now. No changes in the software besides windows updates (which is infrequent, when I remember to do it) and the infrequent updates to SageTV plugins. I did upgrade the ram on it about 3 months ago just because I had an extra 16GB of ram after another build with nothing else to do with.

The past few weeks, all of a sudden, I am getting frequent "Connection to the SageTV server has been lost". It happens in the middle of watching a video and then a minute or so later the video will continue to play. In the course of, say, a 2 hour movie, it will happen two to four times.

I am not seeing any issues on the server and have made no major changes in software. Java on the server is occasionally updated, for security, when I remember (java on the client hasn't been updated since the whole Oracle security hole thing). Though I will say my media library continues to expand. I'm using Drivebender, which makes it so easy to add drives, so now I'm at close to 85TBs (duplicated though and not full) and its probably 1/2 to 3/4 media files. I did do one thing about 6 months ago, which is cut my satellite subscription. I had realized that I had not watched anything I had recorded in over a year, so I cut the subscription and deleted the contents of my recorded TV directory.

Tested the ethernet port and the switch that the SageTV client is connected to and it checks out fine. The mobo on the client has dual ethernet, so I enabled the other port in the bios and tried using that one, still had the problem. Ran windows ramcheck and memtest, ram comes up good. Checked out the hard drives with HDTune, they come up good. Haven't taken a meter to the PSU yet, but its a Corsair "i" model with software for monitoring it and the software says the PSU is fine.

I did notice that my ../Phoenix/cache directory is huge. Like 22GBs huge. Its mostly in ../cache/ImageTrans/GemstoneImages and that dir has so many files in it that Directory Opus sometimes crashes when I open the folder. It would be a pain to delete it all and rebuild it but I could do it if you think that would help.

I have acquired 2 HD300s and those are working fine. This problem seems to only effect the Windows client.

Any ideas or things I could check in troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[jerryt]

Are the IP addresses on the client and server being assigned by a DNS server?

Any new devices with an IP address coming and going from the network? Laptop, etc...

I would try a different switch and assign static IP addresses to client and server.

[nyplayer]

Also check your drives for errors. If you have an open window of opportunity where nothing is recording it is a good Idea to run chkdsk /r.

[silkshadow]

Thanks guys!

No new devices in the past 2 weeks, but I will try a static IP, testing a new switch is going to be a little tough due to the wiring and placement, but I will dig around this weekend.

Nyplayer, you mean on the server right? I hadn't thought about that, good thing to check.

I will run though these things this weekend and report back. Thanks again!

[MattHelm]

If you have a free port on the switch, just switch that first. I have had single ports die. Also, I had a gb switch break, and only allow 100Mb connections.

If switching ports fixes things, I'd still replace the switch, when you get a chance.

If you have one, try a USB to ethernet adapter on the client. The ethernet could be bad.

[silkshadow]

Good tip, I have plenty of open ports on the switch, thanks!

[silkshadow]

Again, thanks for all the ideas guys! In the end nothing worked, installed SageTV onto a laptop and plugged it into the same port that the client was connected to and there was no disconnects. Connected a USB NIC to the client and I was still getting disconnects from SageTV. While I was testing Sage I was doing a continual file copy from the server and when the Sage connection dropped the file copy was humming along.

I have no clue what the heck is causing this. Today I flattened the OS. I have a SSD that's just gathering dust so I dumped an earlier OS image onto the SSD and hope this fixes the issue. If it doesn't I'll be back .

[jerryt]

Check for other software using the same ports.

[silkshadow]

Whoops, sorry JerryT, forgot to come back and check for new replies. Well I did a reinstall/image restore of the OS and I ran into a few other issues (not directly Sage related), but its all sorted now.

Since the image restore, I've had no disconnects. Still not sure what the problem was. I can say on a different topic, SSD and SageTV go well together. Didn't think I would see much improvement but damn she is noticeably faster.