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davidg
Good Bye My Friend
Premium,MVM
join:2002-06-15
Greenville, MS
clubs:
| reply to ProtocolOH
Re: [netopia] Netopia 3346N is crashing today
are you uploading a lot at the tiem it craps out, or downloading, or both? if you max out the upload, then you leave no room for handshakes and the router will crash. if you have a 256k upload for example, you should limit your upload speed inthe program to no more than about 180-190k. you need at least 10% for general overhead and handshakes, and a few extra k for a buffer never hurts.
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Lack of Preparation on YOUR Part does NOT Constitute an Emergency on Mine! | |
ProtocolOH
join:2008-04-19
Beachwood, OH
edit:
April 21st, @11:10AM
| Heh, I'd thought of that, and yes, I clip Azureus' bandwidth. Full-bore, I get about 160KB/s down and about 36KB/s up, so I clip Azureus' aggregate bandwidth to 100KB/s down and 25KB/s up. That lets me browse competently while Azureus does its thing. But no, most of the time I'm just uploading, because all my downstream torrents have completed.
Still, even if I were maxing out my bandwidth, it's no excuse for a router crashing and not recovering itself... whatever happened to a watchdog timer? (I'm an embedded systems engineer, so this type of failure offends me.) Haven't heard from Motorola yet, I hope to in the next couple of days, if their "thank you for mailing us" auto-reply is to be believed.
EDIT: Just got my response from Motorola...
"Thanks for contacting Motorola Broadband Solutions Inc. Please contact ATT for line troubleshooting and they can conference you in with us for Cayman troubleshooting."
Figures. | |
davidg
Good Bye My Friend
Premium,MVM
join:2002-06-15
Greenville, MS
clubs:
| the batwings ain't gonna do a thing to work with you on it.
the 3xxx series has always had problems with continuous uploads. some flake and lock, others never exhibit any symptoms. my 3547 does it form time to time when we send out a lot of data from work. i ran the tweak tester fromteh tools section of this site, then adjusted my machines accordingly and so far no more issues. seems that if you are getting too many fragmented packets the buffer in the router fills and never empties.
as far as watchdog timers, i would jus tlove to see one that worked as you want it! mine usually either trip out too soon or WAY too late. certain phone switches we have sometimes take a couple minutes to reboot after a software update. the watchdog will kick in and reboot before the update is done, forcing it back to the old software!
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Lack of Preparation on YOUR Part does NOT Constitute an Emergency on Mine! | |
ProtocolOH
join:2008-04-19
Beachwood, OH
| Yeah, I figured that Motorola likely wasn't going to lift a finger. It's sad, though... they get a well-documented bug report (well, as detailed as I can put into 1500 words in their webform), and they don't want to fix it. As an embedded software engineer myself, I'm disappointed not only that they'd release a product like that, but also not bother to repair such a defect. And it is a defect... there shouldn't be anything that I can do on this side of the network, short of sending maliciously malformed packets, that will make that router crash. (Note that all my network activity for my Windows machine first goes through my Linux firewall.)
Yeah, watchdog timers are damn near standard in modern MCUs / embedded CPUs. And I know the problem you're describing, not that specific one, but in general. A couple of jobs ago, I was asked to help with fixing the board support package for a module that another group had crafted. Well, they'd farmed out the schematic design, and the designer had implemented an external watchdog device that had to be kicked every second or less, else it would apply hard reset to the CPU. That's what it's supposed to do, right? Except he also provided no means whatsoever of disabling the watchdog device... which was a friggin' pain in the ass when you're trying to initialize registers, check flash, decompress your kernel image, and boot... thing would keep rebooting itself moments after power-up. Even better, you couldn't use an external debugger with the thing... the watchdog had no idea that you had the JTAG debugger plugged in, and it would merrily reboot the CPU after not being kicked. Dumb, dumb, dumb design.
[/rant]
Anyway, here's what I'm trying. I've got a 3-amp DC bench supply, plugged into a UPS, running at 12V... that should eliminate any issues with AC line quality or an undersized wall wart. The router's sticker says it consumes 450mA at 12V, and that's just about right; with my little auto-reboot box plus the lid fan running, the whole thing is pulling just under 500mA, the supply shows.
I've also ditched Azureus and am now running uTorrent, to see if that makes a different. (Azureus, for all its fancy features and stuff, has become rather bloated of late.) I've suspended the operation of my auto-reboot thingy, so that the router can run for days at a time without a reboot, to see how stable the router is under load from uTorrent. For what it's worth, I watched the power consumption of the router on bootup, and it probably started at around 350mA or so and eventually crept up to 450mA once it got everything running. But whether there's no traffic or a full load, the power consumption doesn't budge... so again, I don't think it's a power supply issue. (The brick I was using was rated for 1A, anyway). So, there ya go. I'll report on whether the thing keeps crashing, or whether switching to uTorrent seems to be more Netopia-friendly. | |
koma3504
Advocate
Premium
join:2004-06-22
North Richland Hills, TX | Check the milliamps and voltage on your telephone line. | |
ProtocolOH
join:2008-04-19
Beachwood, OH
| said by koma3504  :Check the milliamps and voltage on your telephone line. Could you please explain to me how this would induce my Netopia 3346N to crash only when I'm running Azureus / BitTorrent? | |
koma3504
Advocate
Premium
join:2004-06-22
North Richland Hills, TX | coencidence | |
ProtocolOH
join:2008-04-19
Beachwood, OH
| OK, update... while I have not checked the milliamps or voltage on my telephone (nor the ambient temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, moon phase, or sunspot activity), I did make one alteration to my system... I'm now running uTorrent instead of Azureus... they're both BitTorrent clients, and I'm running the same level of activity (same torrents, trackers, bandwidth limits, etc). And it's only been three or four days, but the 3346N has not crashed... yet. I plan on running it for another week without power-cycling, and if it runs stable, I'll consider the problem solved, and chalk it up to some weird interaction between the Netopia 3346N and Azureus specifically (and not BitTorrent clients in general).
Side note: While I've always liked Azureus' interface, I'm amazed that uTorrent provides nearly all the functionality of Azureus in a client that's a 215KB (yes, kilo-bytes) executable and occupies ~5MB of RAM, as opposed to 100MB+ for Azureus. I think I'm pretty much sold on uTorrent (especially since it doesn't seem to be crashing my router). | |
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