Samba issues with a NAS box ( I think!)

[JJSH]

Hope this is in the right section, so here goes.

I've got a fresh install of VL 5.8 SOHO ( very, very impressed ).

On my network, I also have a Maxtor Shared storage 500Mb NAS box.

I can see this, along with it's shares, when I type 'smbtree'.

I then created a directory in my Home folder called Nas, and mounted it thus;

/usr/bin/smbmount //nasboxname/share /home/nas

I can see, browse and open my files from this mount point.

However, when I try and open an mp3 on the share, using amarok, it spays about a second of the file, and then stalls. The amarok icon in the panel just constantly shows the egg timer. However, if I open the same file using VLC, all is fine, and I can skip through a 190Mb ish mix without freezes or any problems.

The reason I wouldn't mind getting amarok working is because of the nifty desktop widget in Karumba (SP?)that shows cpu usage, etc, as this has amarok controls on it, which looks nifty 

So, not a massive problem, but has anyone got any thoughts?

[nightflier]

Since you have KDE, try going through Konqueror. Type smb:/ in the address bar for browsing, or smb://[IP_ADDRESS] to go directly there.

[JJSH]

That works fine, and I can browse the shares, but then Amarok seems to copy the whole file over the network before opening it, leaving a copy in \Home, which could get a bit messy with 70Gb of Mp3's 

Is that normal, or do I need to do some configuration somewhere?


BTW - if anyone knows of a Linux UPnP control point, that would also be good, as my NAS box can act as a UPnP server

[nightflier]

I think the issue is that Amarok caches the file locally before playing it. The default is to put the file somewhere in /tmp, where it will be deleted after use. You say it gets dumped and left in your home dir?

VLC and Mplayer seem to handle the files differently, in effect "streaming" them via smb.

[JJSH]

OK, bit of a development.

I don't think it's Amarok related now 

I have just had two occasions sheer the smb share has 'frozen' ~ one when copying about 300 fonts from it to my Vector fonts directory, and the other when playing an (large) mp3 file in VLC. In both instances, it caused my system to grind to a halt, forcing a reboot. I took the opportunity to check the availability of the NAS box from another machine and it was fine and could be accessed / used. I suspect it is samba related?

Where is the best place to start troubleshooting do you think?

Many TIA

[nightflier]

Yeah, something is definitely not right then.

Try opening a console window and run htop. Watch it while performing the file copy and see if some process ends up hogging all the CPU power.

Do you know what chipset your network card uses?

[JJSH]

It's an on board nic on an Asus K8N-VM Mobo , but  just to confirm, I'll paste the output of lspci in a moment  (i.e I can't remember what chipset is on the mobo!)

I'll try looking at htop ~ but just to clarify, it doesn't happen every time I access a network resource, it's about a 3 times a day thing. When it happens, everything appears to freeze, but tbh, I didn't try getting to the CLI, so perhaps that will be possible.

brb

[JJSH]

OK, here is the output of lspci;

00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 0 (rev a2)
00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 1 (rev a2)
00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 5 (rev a2)
00:00.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 4 (rev a2)
00:00.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:00.6 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 3 (rev a2)
00:00.7 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 2 (rev a2)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:04.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:09.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:0a.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 LPC Bridge (rev a2)
00:0a.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP51 SMBus (rev a2)
00:0b.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a2)
00:0b.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a2)
00:0d.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 IDE (rev a1)
00:0e.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller (rev a1)
00:10.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
00:14.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Ethernet Controller (rev a1)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44 [GeForce 6200 TurboCache(TM)] (rev a1)
04:07.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI




You can ignore the Ralink RT61 ~ I've had problems with it in every Linux distro, so haven't enabled it;


root:# ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:17:31:4A:46:6A
          inet addr:192.168.2.8  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:279 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:328 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:101788 (99.4 KiB)  TX bytes:33158 (32.3 KiB)
          Interrupt:16 Base address:0x2000

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

vector://home/jjsh
root:# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

So we're dealing with an nVidia Corporation MCP51 Ethernet Controller (rev a1).

Does that help?

[nightflier]

Intermittent problems are hard to troubleshoot.

That ethernet controller is gigabit, I believe. I remember having problems with one with SiS chipset whenever plugged into a gigabit switch, but worked fine on a 100 base one (kinda shooting in the blind here, though )

A good way to test the hardware is to try several live CD's and see if the problem is persistent. Use distros with different bases, like Vector (Slackware), Ubuntu, Knoppix, Puppy, Mandriva, SuSE.