Rebooting the entire system

[TheOracle]

All,

I have seen a few posts on here regarding rebooting various components and it seems the consensus is to simply power off and back on.

That's possible but my systems seem to be having memory leaks or something. After about a week, the systems are slow to respond whether wired, wireless or zigbee. If I power down all components and restart everything in a certain order, everything works for another week or so.

My question is: Can I go into the kernel itself and set up a cron job to automatically restart the media controller on a weekly basis? Along the same line, could I then have the system recycle the remaining components one at a time after the media controller is back up?

Thanks.

Jimmy

[blub]

In many cases, ours included, the most common cause of slow responding systems after they are running fine for a couple of days/weeks is a network issue.

Many many many network components have problems forwarding certain UpnP and multicast packages correctly - the last ones I think are more important to C4.

Our network got extremely jerky and sometimes none responding after 2 days or so...it was horrible.

After a lot of digging around and changing components (bypassing router / switches etc..) I figured out that the netgear router

was causing a huge delay for whatever reason.

In this forum I found something about multicast packages beeing somewhat important.

So i tweaked that on the netgear router for the specific ports and it immediately got a lot better, butnot really satisfying.

Luckily Netgear provided a Firmware upgrade concering multicast packages and after applying that it was all smooth... :-)

So might wanna check that out :-)

[TheOracle]

Thanks blub. I checked out the router and there are no firmwares updates available. Based on your comments, would it be appropriate to turn off the UPnP feature? I didn't locate anything in the setup for the multicast though.

[dogdvr]

May I ask what router you are using Oracle?

[TheOracle]

It's a Netgear WNR834Bv1.

[dogdvr]

unfortunatley I am not familiar with that paticular router. But I can tell you that I chased the problem you are talking about on a couple of systems for months. I switched them both to the linksys rv042 and have not had a problem since. For the wireless part I use a netgear wap102.

You can try to chase down this problem, but I have found if you start with a good backbone you will be happier.

Good luck

Brent

[blub]

Hello Oracle

At the Moment you are using a SoHo router which sadly is inapropriate in C4 systems.

It is often underestimated what requirements are needed for multimedia system to run smooth, and many SoHo stuff just isnt good enough for that.... .

SoHo Routers and switches do usually not have the necessary options in the config menu to actually "work" on such an issue - they either work or they dont.

U can try to disable upnp but I doubt that it will help much because it is very likely that multicast packages are not forewarded / handeled correctly.

For C4 installations switches with user interface such as "smart switches" and fully managed switches are widely used becuase they offer possibilites for multicast / and routing and a lot more configurable options to play with in case of problems - and they are way more reliable and have better support :-)

Here is what I would do 1st if you want to narrow it down a bit:

I assume you use static IPs - if not please, please do :-)!!!!

1) check all cables and connections for obvious faults and loose connectors

2) check your wiring that you do not have a network loop (dont laugh! that sometimes happens by accident if the wires arent tagged correctly and the "user" plugs all cables to the switch, or if you have multiple switches in the house and more than one cable per room ......)...that kills a network after a while....

3) Try a different switch i.e. from a friend, and use your netgear as an accesspoint only

---- U do not have to restart the whole system after changing the switch just wait a couple of minutes.

These are the three most likely scenarios:

1) If it is still all crap ----> get a decent switch and or tech guy who knows how to analyze network traffic (good friend maybe )

2) Wallpanels work fine / or better, but Wireless wlan remote is still jerky and very slow ---> AP (your old router) is most likely the main problem, the new test switch might be sufficient.

3) It all runs perfect now ----> very unlikely :-)

I currently use a Linksys router as an AP (definitely not the best) with DD-WRT open source firmware - lots of options to put priority to multicast and ports either port or MAC based. That totally solved my jerky wlan remote problem.

greetz and good luck

[neil12011]

I honestly don't subscribe to the "just power cycle it" approach. Having to cycle the entire system defeats the purpose of "Everyday Easy" an is a sure bet that something is not right somewhere. Networks are usually the main culprit, with the actual C4 hardware rarely being the case. Not saying that it doesn't happen, but I do not reset anything on my system except maybe once a year.

[TheOracle]

Thanks for the advice/opinions. I agree with the idea that it should never be required to reboot the entire system as it's not a Microsoft product. However, what I've noticed is that after the reboot, everything works very well.

Investigating things I had taken for granted turned up a few things. First not all the equipment has a static IP. That will be changed this weekend. Unless it's required, I never like DHCP. I also have two routers. One opened up to the outside world because that's where my internet and TV come through. The C4 system is on the internal network with a separate IP range. Most of my home equipment is on the internal network. Is that too much for the C4 network?

If I need to replace the internal router, can someone give me a good model number?

[thecodeman]

It used to be recommended to split up the network that way, but more often than not it was not setup correctly. Try running everyting on one network for a while and see how that goes if you're going to be changing ip addresses anyway.

[lippavisual]

You should ditch both routers and buy one that can handle that much traffic. Example would be the Linksys RV042. If you need wireless access, buy a seperate Access Point for that. Hybrid routers suck, IMHO.

[TheOracle]

Can't ditch the primary router as that is the one provided by my cable company (Verizon) to deliver my FiOS TV and internet. Nice try though

[akg4y]

There is a way to do it actually, you have to change the FIOS router into a bridge, not trivial, but doable.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20006536-Make-your-actiontec-a-bridge-with-VOD-working-with-REV-D

[Matt]

Can't ditch the primary router as that is the one provided by my cable company (Verizon) to deliver my FiOS TV and internet. Nice try though

Couldn’t you statically address your POS and disable dhcp? Then plug it into a decent router that allows heavy traffic?

[akg4y]

No its more complicated than that because of the way FIOS handles video on demand along with the internet traffic.