Help - WAF crashing!

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

Does it matter what version? I'm on Win8 and I'm seeing that the latest version of iperf for Windows is v3, but I'm not finding any clear versions where I can tell what to install. There are multitudes of files associated with it, what do I need to download? I'm seeing lots of "tar.gz" files and such.

what about this one?


https://iperf.fr/download/iperf_2.0.....5-2-win32.zip


Eddy

[pjpjpjpj]

Does it matter that that version is v2 and the latest is v3? Is v2 compatible with Win8?

Well, now this is great. The HD300 I tried doing this on can't find the server at all and the PuTTy telnet is giving me "network error: connection refused". And I've run out of time for today.

So, lemme ask, assuming I actually can get this going this weekend: what could come of it? If I get it working and it finds errors in packets or whatever, what would the solution be? Is this all a test to see if I have problems with my NIC (which is on the MB)? Would the solution then be to get a gigabit NIC card and put it in the server? Just asking because I've pretty much tried everything else (switching cables around, using different switches, skipping the router, etc.) and none of that seems to make a difference, so I'm pretty sure it's not the switches or cables. If that's really only the possible/likely solution, I might just go buy a freaking card and try that rather than trying to figure out all this networking stuff that is miles above my proverbial pay grade.

The other thing I am thinking is that maybe I just copy my wiz.bin, shut the computer down, reinstall my old hard drive that was running Sage in winXP, do the wiz.bin replacement deal, and see if that works. That would at least (if it didn't work) peg it as a pure hardware problem and not a software/file problem, right? And if it did work, I would at least have a running system where my very frustrated kids and wife could watch TV for the first time in a week and then I could work on redoing the current SSD Win8.1 OS drive from scratch another time.

I really don't want to completely do a fresh reinstall of Sage on my current OS drive....

[routerunner]

The iperf test is just to understand whether the NIC on the server is faulty.

Have you tried to remove every plugin and run a stock V7 STV?

Downgrading to XP might be a very good idea to discriminate between a software and hardware fault and maybe the best course of action to recover the WAF.

Good luck
Eddy

[firenice]

pjpj

You should be able to see the sage extenders in the network under windows explorer. You should be able to open the folders on the extenders from there also.

If not then you either have a permission issue or the power outage has caused (2) items to get the same IP address from the DHPC server. First thing to check would be the router clients, on the router, and make sure no two have the same IP address.

IIRC you recently bridged your modem/router combo to use a different router. If so, the power outage may have reset something with this setup and may be causing your issue. If you did not have the server with a fixed IP it may have caused an issue also.

You can test the network connection, if you have a laptop, by connecting at the extenders end and transfering a video file. Roughly 2-3 GB file should transfer at 60-80 MBs and YMMV. You can also ping the server from that location and it will tell you if packets are being lost.

You may also want to check that the server did not reset itself as a public network and that it is still part of the homegroup. Sounds like it didn't but would check anyway.

If your wireless network is not working like expected your power outage may have reset the client back to 2.4Ghz mode. You may have to reconnect the client to 5.0 Ghz mode for videos. I have this issue with my phone which will grab the first known network connection.

BTW iperf 3 does not work on windows.

Good Luck

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by firenice

You should be able to see the sage extenders in the network under windows explorer. You should be able to open the folders on the extenders from there also.

Hmmm. I've never been able to see any of my extenders in Windows Explorer. I've also never plugged USB drives into the USB ports either, is this how you'd get them to show up? I just plugged in a flash drive to an extender and nothing is showing up in "network"...

Originally Posted by firenice

If not then you either have a permission issue or the power outage has caused (2) items to get the same IP address from the DHPC server. First thing to check would be the router clients, on the router, and make sure no two have the same IP address.

All are separate IP addresses.

Originally Posted by firenice

IIRC you recently bridged your modem/router combo to use a different router. If so, the power outage may have reset something with this setup and may be causing your issue. If you did not have the server with a fixed IP it may have caused an issue also.

I did not have a fixed IP (I don't know the implications of that - don't you have to pay extra to your ISP for that?). The problem is that I don't know how to call up the modem since I changed it to bridge mode. However, I don't think that's it anyway; I tried the old modem access IP from when it wasn't bridged (192.168.1.200) and it didn't work, and I have also tested the system with the modem completely disconnected and it was the same.

Originally Posted by firenice

You may also want to check that the server did not reset itself as a public network and that it is still part of the homegroup. Sounds like it didn't but would check anyway.

The server is still part of the homegroup.

Originally Posted by firenice

If your wireless network is not working like expected your power outage may have reset the client back to 2.4Ghz mode. You may have to reconnect the client to 5.0 Ghz mode for videos. I have this issue with my phone which will grab the first known network connection.

The wireless network is working just fine.

Originally Posted by firenice

You can test the network connection, if you have a laptop, by connecting at the extenders end and transfering a video file. Roughly 2-3 GB file should transfer at 60-80 MBs and YMMV. You can also ping the server from that location and it will tell you if packets are being lost.

I can do that, but since all the extenders are reacting the same (not just one), I can't imagine they all went bad. They were all unplugged during the power outage so I doubt anything happened with them.

BTW, I have confirmed that all outgoing streaming from the server appears to be having problems. I had started playing videos with PlayOn or the Sage Phoenix android app and they appeared to be okay, but I didn't let them play long enough, and I think I was just seeing the buffered data, which was therefore okay. The data isn't failing completely, it's just not streaming smoothly, so when I have a buffer, that part will work.

I pinged the server from my laptop which is currently wireless. It returned 4 packets with no errors. I will take it to another location and try it hardwired, through the extender cable, and will report back. However, since I can't stream videos (well) from the server on my laptop wirelessly, I suspect those connections are going to show error-free pings as well. It's possible that the pings could be fine (since they are instantaneous rather than continuous) but that streaming could be messed up, right?

I have checked more and more full-HD recordings being done by the HDHRs throughout this past week, by playing them on the server PC, and they are just fine. At this point, I can safely say that the server can receive just fine, but not stream/output. Does that sound like something that would most likely be the NIC, as opposed to a PC software/firmware/"other hardware" issue?

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

I have checked more and more full-HD recordings being done by the HDHRs throughout this past week, by playing them on the server PC, and they are just fine. At this point, I can safely say that the server can receive just fine, but not stream/output. Does that sound like something that would most likely be the NIC, as opposed to a PC software/firmware/"other hardware" issue?

The HDHR are network encoders right? The fact that the recordings are playing fine on the server it just means that the TCP/IP protocol was doing what was supposed to do at the time of the recording, hence even if you had lots of errors the TCP/IP protocol would require retransmission from the HDHR and that explain why the recordings are OK. The fact that streaming out from the server is not smooth is again proofing the fact that the TCP/IP protocol is doing the job of requiring retransmission of faulty packets and the only difference is that you're actually watching the effect of packet retransmission. This kind of errors can be due to a wrong configuration in the NIC, like jumbo packets are enabled, for instance, and other network equipment aren't.

Different story is whether the playback is actually showing not just sluggishnesh, but pixellation as well which means that the packets are not only with errors, but that the retransmission failed to the point of containing wrong data, that is a serious error which could mean a hardware fault.

Ping is not enough to detect network errors as what ping does is to send a specific packet called ICMP that only tells you whether the end point is reachable or not, and by far exhaustive enough for this purpose.

Regarding the extender being visible by Windows and therefore able to browse your Windows shares, you can only achieve this enabling the CIF/SMB server on the extender when running in standalone mode. The CIF/SMB server is disabled by default and nothing to do with your test.

Eddy

[pjpjpjpj]

Thanks to everyone for your advice, tips, and instruction. This board is truly awesome and an amazing pool of knowledge. I took a leap of faith, based on everyone's thoughts here, went to the store and bought a new NIC. Came home, installed it, rebooted my router, rebooted Sage, and viola!, everything is working perfectly.

No telling whether the on-board port had a physical failure or whether it was a configuration that could have been resolved... at this point, I don't really care. The $14.99 I spent at the store is worth the family happiness and me not having to spend any more time messing with it!

Thanks again, everyone.