Occasionally (about once a day), when I bring the M1000 out of standby it gives the "No library found" msg, even though it was working fine from the WMC server before going into standby. The only thing that brings it back is a power cycle of the M1000. Pulling the enet (I'm using wired) doesn't help, restarting the WMC service doesn't help, rebooting the WMC server doesn't help. I'm using the 2.1 Beta firmware, that's all I've ever used on my M1000, so I don't know if this is a new issue or not. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this?

Yup, just a power cycle of the SB brings the server back. It has happened enough times that I have had chances to experiment.

Both server and SB are wired.

I am using DHCP, but with a 1 week lease, and I'm using static DHCP so the SB and Server get the same address all the time.

I am familiar with telnet and have telnetted to the SB, but haven't tried when it has been in this state. Was planning to the next time because I wanted to see if the reboot command would also take care of the problem. That would be easier than pulling the plug.

So, when the SB comes out of standby, it doesn't go looking for servers? It just uses the list it had before? If so, how/when does it look for servers (other than during a power on cycle)? I didn't see anything in the menus to cause a scan for servers.

Would this mean that anytime my server reboots I need to reboot the SB?

Did a little experiment and found out that if I restart WMC then I have to reboot the SB for it to see the server again. This may explain what I've been seeing. We've had a lot of storms here for the last week or so, and have been shutting down the server as a precaution against power outages.

So, is this working as designed? If so, then I guess I have a feature request or 2. First, have the SB look for servers when coming out of standby, especially if none are in its list anymore. Second, add a reboot/rescan option to the menus, it'd be easier than telnetting or power cycling.

Thanks for the assistance and the great product!

Hmmm. No, not as designed. When WMC starts up again, it should broadcast a "hello" message to say that it's alive.

We are aware of one issue in this area, though: when we see that "hello" message, we ask the newly-arrived device for its Device Description XML file. What we've seen is that sometimes WMC is so busy when it first starts up that it doesn't reply to that message in a timely fashion. If we are unable to get the XML file, then the server won't show up for about 10 minutes (when we periodically look around to see if we missed anything).

As an experiment, you might want to see if the server appears 10 minutes after you restart the PC. That would tend to indicate that it's this issue.

Regarding your question about looking for servers when we come out of standby, we're actually awake-enough during standby to keep track of the comings and goings of servers, so there should be no need to do a new scan.

I posted a problem about a week ago of a similar problem, but with iTunes. I think these problems may be related.

http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=506

As a test, I unplugged the Ethernet cable to the SB and waited. After a while the SB said it couldn't find any libraries. I tried everything through the remote that I could think of (on->standby->on, etc.) but nothing. I have to power-cycle to get it to reconnect.

I think what is happening in my system is that my link is going down for a bit and then the SB drops the iTunes connection and won't reaquire it.

Setup:
SB1000 is running version 2.1 beta 2. I have iTunes 4.7 running on a server (Windows Server 2003) and Windows Media Connect running on a workstation (Windows XP). I use a pair of D-link 7100AP's configured in bridging Turbo-A mode. The access-point, my server, and my workstation are all connected together with a switch. On the SB-side, I have the other access-point connected to a switch and then to the SB.

-J

RokuMike wrote:

What we've seen is that sometimes WMC is so busy when it first starts up that it doesn't reply to that message in a timely fashion. If we are unable to get the XML file, then the server won't show up for about 10 minutes (when we periodically look around to see if we missed anything).

Regarding your question about looking for servers when we come out of standby, we're actually awake-enough during standby to keep track of the comings and goings of servers, so there should be no need to do a new scan.

I have approximately 12,000 songs in 136GB and WMC starts up and finishes scanning a about 2-3 minutes on my measley P3 system. I consider this acceptable given that I never shut it down. It didn't always used to be this fast though. WMC used to take 15-20 minutes to start up and would thrash the processor at 100% usage! I discovered that the slowdown was due to playlists with bad and/or non-existent songs. It appears that WMC scans the entire shared folder(s) each and every time it runs across a playlist song that it cannot initially find in its library. I simply deleted the playlists and all is well speed-wise. You can easily tell if playlists point to songs that don't exist by reading the WMC error log.

I still have the problem others have described - many times the M1000 starts up and reports that the library cannot be found. There is no refresh command of any sort and the only "fix" I have found is to pull the power and start again. Another issue (related?) is that even if it does find the library it doesn't always work properly. For example, if I browse by artist it may work fine, but if I browse by album or song it will frequently state that no items were found. If I repetitvely browse by album it eventually loads correctly, ususally after the third attempt. I suspect a timeout issue, but where? The (wired) PC is a slow P3 with 256MB and a very fast Seagate Barracuda drive and the M1000 is wireless. I don't know the connect rate, but it is goes fast enough to allow streaming of WMA Lossless for hours on end without a hitch. I had the problem on two released firmwares and the second 2.1 beta

rvacha, when you run into the problem where a browse request doesn't succeed on the first attempt, but does succeed on a later attempt, does the "Loading browse data" message show up on screen for about 10 seconds before it says that it didn't find any items? If so, then your conjecture about a timeout sounds like it might be the right one.

If we don't receive at least the beginnings of a response within 10 seconds, we do time out. When you do a browse like this, it's a fairly CPU-intensive task on the server computer (especially with such a large library!), so it may be that it's simply taking too long. But, when it finally finishes, it caches some part of the result and this allows it to succeed more quickly the second time.

Hadn't seen this for a couple of days, but it happened again today. Here are some details:

Spent a good part of the day ripping CDs to my library with WMC running, SB in standby.

Finished ripping CDs and checked WMC's detailed status and it showed that it hit an unknown error (looks like it scanned while I was ripping and got screwed up), so my library was "Shared with errors".

Restarted WMC (didn't think to check the SB status at this point), WMC came up with no errors.

Brought SB out of standby, and no libraries were found.

Put SB back into standby, waited 40 minutes, brought SB out of standby, still no libraries found. SB back to standby.

Restarted WMC again, it came up with no errors.

Brought SB out standby, no libraries. SB back to standby.

Waited 20 minutes, brought SB out of standby, still no libraries.

Telneted to SB, WMC server pinged ok, "reboot" SB.

SB found the library.

So, it would seem that at some point WMC is hitting an error and somehow getting the SB hung up on that error. Thoughts?

RokuMike wrote:

rvacha, when you run into the problem where a browse request doesn't succeed on the first attempt, but does succeed on a later attempt, does the "Loading browse data" message show up on screen for about 10 seconds before it says that it didn't find any items? If so, then your conjecture about a timeout sounds like it might be the right one.

This is exactly what happens. Another reason I suspect a timeout is that the SB does better with the "lists" that are smaller (i.e. artist and genre) and worse with lists that are larger (i.e. title, album)

I run XP and have the server PC optimized for server performance (I think). Specifically for Performance Options I have Processor Scheduling optimized for background services (instead of programs) and Memory Usage optimized for system cache (instead of programs). Perhaps these are not the best settings now that I run WMC? Anybody experiment with this?

ikeboy wrote:

So, it would seem that at some point WMC is hitting an error and somehow getting the SB hung up on that error. Thoughts?

Right click on the "shared with errors" message and select "Status Details" It will summarize the problems it had.

From my experience, however, the SB "no items found" and "no librbaries found" issue is unrelated to this IF WMC is finished scanning (and this can take a long time if there are errors such as playlists with non-existent songs)

rvacha wrote:

Right click on the "shared with errors" message and select "Status Details" It will summarize the problems it had.

)

I had already done that, that is where I found the "Unknown Error" I mentioned.

rvacha wrote:

From my experience, however, the SB "no items found" and "no librbaries found" issue is unrelated to this IF WMC is finished scanning (and this can take a long time if there are errors such as playlists with non-existent songs)

Forgot to mention earlier, I have no playlists at this point in time. The "unknown error" seemed to be because WMC was scanning the folder (particular album folder was mentioned in the detailed status) that I was ripping to at that instant.

ikeboy wrote:

Occasionally (about once a day), when I bring the M1000 out of standby it gives the "No library found" msg, even though it was working fine from the WMC server before going into standby. The only thing that brings it back is a power cycle of the M1000. Pulling the enet (I'm using wired) doesn't help, restarting the WMC service doesn't help, rebooting the WMC server doesn't help. I'm using the 2.1 Beta firmware, that's all I've ever used on my M1000, so I don't know if this is a new issue or not. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this?

I get this all the time too. I have to force a reboot either through telnetting in and rebooting or a hard reboot.

I'm using 2.0.28 firmware I think...I can ping the soundbridge [obviously since I can telnet in...], and the media server is valid since I can see it via iTunes on another machine but when it comes out of standby alot of times I just get nothing until I reboot. Weird!

Bump.

I am still seeing this problem.

Just to confirm: when this happens, you still have network connectivity to the SoundBridge (telnet was mentioned), correct? To verify you could always go to System Configuration and choose the Software Version and Updates item just to make sure that the SoundBridge can see the network and contact the update server.