mythtv
Thursday, February 26 2015
Samsung's SmartHub
[15:55:31] matt [wronka.org]/Trip Two nights ago, my wife went to bed, and I tried to watch some Columbo on Netflix (I was up to the Great Santini, who sets up his own alibi through a fragile, technical, contrivance). We've only recently subscribed to Netflix since I've always been leary of the reliability of cloud services and rental subscriptions like this in general. It turns out the flakey Samsung implementation was more to blame.
This isn't abnormal. First off, the Samsung equipment (we own two of their TVs and one DVD player, all with essentially the same software) seem to arbitrarily forget WiFi passwords, which makes supporting them frustrating if not useless (they're all on the unsecured network now). Sometimes it fails to connect for a short period, and I need to just wait; that wasn't happening.
Obviously, there was a larger problem. I gave up and watched TopGear on my MythTV box instead, expecting whatever issue Samsung was having to resolve itself the next day. Why a box can't trust that it's on the Internet, or at least be optimistic about it once it's gotten an IP address, and a DNS server that resolves what it needs is an open question that I've tried to ask Samsung support (like the TV's software, I'm not optimistic for a response).
Yesterday while I was at work, I got a message from my wife, complaining about the DVD player not thinking it had Internet access. Obviously, she wanted to think it was a problem with our network—which is reasonable, given that's what the software said—but it turns out Samsung still didn't have their system up. It seems that there was some DNS hokeyness with their Akamai DSA settings. After a chain of CNAMEs (some of which included "china-" prefixes for some reason) eventually we got very short TTL addresses, which were not returning appropriate answers for the TV.
A Web search found somebody who *had* found an IP address that worked, also being served through Akamai DSA:
http://www.myce.com/news/smart-tv-mayhem-sony-samsung-users-central-servers-go-75137/
The resulting IP for www.samsung.com was 23.66.247.46; while you're setting-up your own DNS for your Samsung devices, I also suggest making ad.samsungadhub.com and rd.samsungadhub.com either fail or point to localhost since these are what send and track impressions for the annoying little piece of real estate in the top right corner.
I strongly discourage anyone from buying one of these devices (and apparently Sony devices) for these features, since they seem to be fragile. As I was trying to find information on the current outage (Samsung was not forthcoming and even mentioned on their support page of no known issues), I found references and news articles for outages regularly going back to 2013. It's clear Samsung doesn't treat this as production functionality.
More coverage today, after a couple days of this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/26/samsung_sony_tv_outage/
[15:55:31] matt [wronka.org]/Trip Two nights ago, my wife went to bed, and I tried to watch some Columbo on Netflix (I was up to the Great Santini, who sets up his own alibi through a fragile, technical, contrivance). We've only recently subscribed to Netflix since I've always been leary of the reliability of cloud services and rental subscriptions like this in general. It turns out the flakey Samsung implementation was more to blame.
This isn't abnormal. First off, the Samsung equipment (we own two of their TVs and one DVD player, all with essentially the same software) seem to arbitrarily forget WiFi passwords, which makes supporting them frustrating if not useless (they're all on the unsecured network now). Sometimes it fails to connect for a short period, and I need to just wait; that wasn't happening.
Obviously, there was a larger problem. I gave up and watched TopGear on my MythTV box instead, expecting whatever issue Samsung was having to resolve itself the next day. Why a box can't trust that it's on the Internet, or at least be optimistic about it once it's gotten an IP address, and a DNS server that resolves what it needs is an open question that I've tried to ask Samsung support (like the TV's software, I'm not optimistic for a response).
Yesterday while I was at work, I got a message from my wife, complaining about the DVD player not thinking it had Internet access. Obviously, she wanted to think it was a problem with our network—which is reasonable, given that's what the software said—but it turns out Samsung still didn't have their system up. It seems that there was some DNS hokeyness with their Akamai DSA settings. After a chain of CNAMEs (some of which included "china-" prefixes for some reason) eventually we got very short TTL addresses, which were not returning appropriate answers for the TV.
A Web search found somebody who *had* found an IP address that worked, also being served through Akamai DSA:
http://www.myce.com/news/smart-tv-mayhem-sony-samsung-users-central-servers-go-75137/
The resulting IP for www.samsung.com was 23.66.247.46; while you're setting-up your own DNS for your Samsung devices, I also suggest making ad.samsungadhub.com and rd.samsungadhub.com either fail or point to localhost since these are what send and track impressions for the annoying little piece of real estate in the top right corner.
I strongly discourage anyone from buying one of these devices (and apparently Sony devices) for these features, since they seem to be fragile. As I was trying to find information on the current outage (Samsung was not forthcoming and even mentioned on their support page of no known issues), I found references and news articles for outages regularly going back to 2013. It's clear Samsung doesn't treat this as production functionality.
More coverage today, after a couple days of this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/26/samsung_sony_tv_outage/
Saturday, October 19 2013
Netgear ReadyNAS 6 Ultra
[16:38:13] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ Periodically, my MythTV DVR has trouble pushing video to the front-ends. Jumping into the backend, it turns-out that this is because it's only pulling about 1MB/s from the Netgear Ready NAS 6 Ultra. I tried a variety of things, such as defragging the XFS filesystem I'm using on it, to no avail. Having a little more time this morning and nothing important to record, I spent a little more time looking at it, and realized that I was getting between 58ms and ~85ms ping times to the NAS which was directly connected over a 1Gb link (previously there was a combination 1Gb switch and WiFi AP in between I had blamed). 58ms is exceptoinally bad for this connection, and originally I thought I must have entered the address of my receiver connected via a WiFi link, but after tripple checking the receiver was actually < 2ms and the directly connected Ready NAS was magnitudes slower.
Rebooting the NAS immediately brought the latency back down to just over 0.2ms average and disk I/O back up to ~30MB/s, a huge change from before but a very dissapointing result. It looks like I ran into this last in early September from the NAS's log history.
[16:38:13] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ Periodically, my MythTV DVR has trouble pushing video to the front-ends. Jumping into the backend, it turns-out that this is because it's only pulling about 1MB/s from the Netgear Ready NAS 6 Ultra. I tried a variety of things, such as defragging the XFS filesystem I'm using on it, to no avail. Having a little more time this morning and nothing important to record, I spent a little more time looking at it, and realized that I was getting between 58ms and ~85ms ping times to the NAS which was directly connected over a 1Gb link (previously there was a combination 1Gb switch and WiFi AP in between I had blamed). 58ms is exceptoinally bad for this connection, and originally I thought I must have entered the address of my receiver connected via a WiFi link, but after tripple checking the receiver was actually < 2ms and the directly connected Ready NAS was magnitudes slower.
Rebooting the NAS immediately brought the latency back down to just over 0.2ms average and disk I/O back up to ~30MB/s, a huge change from before but a very dissapointing result. It looks like I ran into this last in early September from the NAS's log history.
Saturday, November 3 2012
CNet Hacks
[20:50:53] matt [wronka.org]/navic I've been browsing through the video streams (podcasts) available by default in the netvision plug-in for MythTV. CNet's news has been hit-or-miss, with some very interesting and in-depth articles once in a while, but mostly fluffy or breezy-main-stream articles.
The CNet feeds seem to be similar (I can't suggest anyone waste their time with The Linux Action Show! for instance), although Tom Merritt's CNet Hacks videos are exceptionally lucid and good for non-technical viewers in a technical world. Other videos even include SQL injections and by other presenters, although the first few I watched were all from Mr. Merritt.
These videos, unfortunately, date back to 2009 and Mr. Merritt is no longer with CNet, which explains why they're more readily found via search engines than CNet's own site.
[20:50:53] matt [wronka.org]/navic I've been browsing through the video streams (podcasts) available by default in the netvision plug-in for MythTV. CNet's news has been hit-or-miss, with some very interesting and in-depth articles once in a while, but mostly fluffy or breezy-main-stream articles.
The CNet feeds seem to be similar (I can't suggest anyone waste their time with The Linux Action Show! for instance), although Tom Merritt's CNet Hacks videos are exceptionally lucid and good for non-technical viewers in a technical world. Other videos even include SQL injections and by other presenters, although the first few I watched were all from Mr. Merritt.
These videos, unfortunately, date back to 2009 and Mr. Merritt is no longer with CNet, which explains why they're more readily found via search engines than CNet's own site.
Friday, September 7 2012
[02:52:42]
matt [wronka.org]/Vasillisa
Oddly the MythTV music plugin doesn't default to reusing the standard audio settings; you need to explicitly set the audio device to 'default'.