MBLive 2TB Twonky Problems

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

I have been running without many problems since I first got my drive.  I copied over approximately 1tb of my M4V files to my shares, and approximately 35gb of music for the iTunes library.

I also have a large share dedicated to all my ebooks.

Needless to say, I have amassed a large sum of data and have backed it all up on my new drive.

I have been running the TwonkyMedia Server for approximately 1 month now, and other than not supporting my previous DVD copies on MKV containers, it works pretty flawlessly when streaming to my different devices.

As of today however, I was attempting to connect to my media server using my PS3 and realized I had left the ethernet cable unplugged.  Once I plugged it back into my network, I saw within a minute my TwonkyMedia Server appear.

However, as soon as I clicked to stream from it, it decided to kick me out and I have been without my media server since then.

I have attempted the following steps:

  • upgrade to latest firmware

  • reboot as well as shut down my hard drive to regain its functionality

All this has done nothing to help my Twonky MediaServer from appearing on my network to any of my devices.

I see the Twonky configuration screen and have the ability to “Enable” and “Disable” it, but the “Status” screen continues to show nothing.

I have tried a rebuilt as well as a rescan, but without any luck.

This is incredibly frustrating, as you can imagine.

To make absolutely certain that I did not lose any data, I enabled SSH on the book by following the easy enough steps by going to http://ip_address/UI/ssh and I have successfully discovered that all my shares are indeed in tact.  I can mount any of these shares without any troubles either.

By running ps aux I see that TwonkyMediaServer IS running in the processes once I start it from the GUI, but still I cannot find it on my network.

The only solution that I’ve been able to search for online has been the use of the “reset to factory default” option, which clearly states that it “erases all data” on the drive.  Does this also include ALL my shared content?  I don’t care about resetting the UI and getting this thing back up and running, but I don’t have the external space nor the time to start copying over 1tb on my network.

WD claims that it can connect and transfer at high speeds over a gigabit network, I’ve yet to hit over 15mb/sec of constant traffic, and just a tad over 20mb/sec when directly connected to my Macbook Pro (static assigned IPs of course).

This last set of statements makes it obvious that the rate at which I would need to copy over my content to a non-existent drive of that size could take me well over 8-9hrs, time I cannot afford to waste.

Can anyone help me regain access to TwonkyMediaServer without having to go through “factory defaults” and risk losing all this data, the data that is stored on this drive for backup purposes (i removed the content from several drives and have since recycled said drives)

Please WD, don’t tell me I have to “clear” all the data on this drive simply because I can’t access the media server.  I bought this thing for a reason; tight budget + NAS need + media server replacement.  My other option was a QNAP, and I regret having done so if this can’t be fixed by any other means than to copy over the entire 1tb+ of content over to another non-existant drive.

Thanks to anyone who can help, and in any way that I can provide any insight, I will take screenshots and pull out logs (from UI or SSH) so that we can get this media server up and running.  A simple function of resetting the Twonky to factory defaults would be handy!

PEACE

2

try the command

lsof | grep 49152

Do you see the process “upnp_nas” listed there?

Can you get to the Twonky Configuration Page at all?   mybooklive:9000

If so, go to Maintenance  and enable LOGGING.

Does that turn up anything?

3

I am not at home at the present time, but I will run that command once I get home.  I imagine this is a command through ssh?

Also, I cannot access http://host:9000 nor http://ip_address:9000

I just find it strange that all it took was a little hickup from my PS3 being disconnected to have this happen.

It seems to me, at least, a corrupted DB or something similar.

Thanks for the advice, I will return the results a little later today. :slight_smile:

PEACE

4

Yes, those are SSH commands.

I think the fact that this happened during your PS3’s absense is purely coincidental.

5

Unfortunately you are not the only one with the same problem. And looks like factory restore is the only option to regain Twonky. See threads:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/is-Twonky-gone-Cant-restart/td-p/154348

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/I-just-crashed-my-Twonkey/m-p/133654/highlight/true#M815

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/Twonky-crashed-full-factory-restore-in-progress/m-p/156320/highlight/true#M1249

Not a good situation where you constantly have to fear that it might happen again. I also had to go and buy extra hard drive just to get the media out of MBL so I can do the restore.

6

Nothing turned up after the lsof command and no, I cannot hit port 9000. I’ve tried repeatedly to enable/disable the server without any change in its status…

There HAS to be a way to reset the Twonky DB from not being corrupt. I’m ready to ssh into it and manually install a newer version if I have to just to see if I can get a server kicking.

I run several ubuntu services on a couple other boxes at home, it can’t be too difficult. I can live with not having access to it through WD’s web UI is fine with me as long as I can stream from the system as it was intended to do.

Thanks again for any and all help!

7

Tony,

You wouldn’t happen to know of a simple way to replace and have the TwonkyMedia server back up and running, would you?

I haven’t got anywhere with WD’s technical support by email.  The answers given to me, because I don’t want to reset my entire device to factory default, are there:

1)  Call in for RMA.  Oh, you could also do Advanced RMA

2)  We don’t support SSH

I am not one normally to complain, because I strongly believe that if I complain about something, I better have a way of doing something about it.

Well, I do have something I can do, except I need more in-depth knowledge and expertise from those who have it.  The “hacks” and “guides” I’ve read online mostly relate to the WE version of these drives, but replacing and upgrading TwonkyMedia seems to be an easy task according to the users of said wikis.

Even if this setup requires me to start the process/application from a SSH command-line and that I add it to my startup of this device, it’s better than having no streaming media.

My last recourse is to wait it out until I can get enough $$$ to buy myself a proper NAS+media server (i.e. QNAP) and in the meantime run PS3 MediaServer on one of my faster ubuntu systems and hope that it runs well (i.e. transcoding options, etc)

Once I have this money saved up, and the QNAP purchased, I will then (and only then) either run a factory default and/or call in for an RMA.  I can use this drive for other purposes at this point.

I just can’t accept failure with this device within a couple months of its purchase, and for absolutely no reason.

If this goes against some “forum rules and/or guidelines”, then feel free to PM me to get me on track in solving my issue.

If you can and will! :slight_smile:

Thanks again for your help

8

I have no idea how to upgrade Twonky on these things.   I do believe there is another thread with instructions on how to do it though.

9

I’ll take a look around, but if you happen to find said thread, keep me posted.

Thank you

10

machstem,

I definitely understand your frustration.  WD tech support can’t support any configuration via SSH or modifications to third-party software (like Twonky) that is bundled with the drive.  Linux isn’t a supported OS, so the techs don’t have any Linux training and when you SSH into a MBW, ShareSpace, or My Book Live and get a Linux shell, well… there you go.  :slight_smile:

Resetting the Twonky database and then restarting the My Book Live should have fixed this (and often does), but since it didn’t then your best bet is to do a factory reset, unfortunately.  :frowning:

As for what caused the problem, you probably stored too many files for Twonky to index efficiently.  We’ve only tested the server as implemented on the My Book Live with up to about 80,000 files successfully.  I’m not an engineer and I don’t know the exact details (whether 80,001 files makes the drive catch on fire or if they just stopped testing at that point, etc.) but I would say it’s best to keep the number of shared files under 80,000.

As for the command ‘lsof | grep 49152’, that’s unlikely to work on anything, since 49152 is probably referring to an inode number in the file system on the My Book World and those tend to be random.  If you want to see if the process “upnp_nas” has any files open it’s best to search the output of lsof with ‘lsof | grep upnp_nas’ or else with ‘lsof | grep [name of file you are checking]’.

But if you can access http://mybooklive/ (the Dashboard UI) bot http://mybooklive:9000/ (the Twonky control panel) then it’s most likely that Twonky is broken.  In that case the factory reset is going to be your best bet.  It will erase all configuration and user data (users, shares, files, etc.) on your drive but it will keep the current firmware.

Let me know if you have any further questions.  And hey, Ubuntu 11.04 comes out in exactly one week.  :slight_smile:

11

Nathan:  49152 refers to the TCP port used for the DLNA listener.

12

Yeah, I had a feeling.

I am still under the belief that Twonky can be rebuilt, since doing a factory reset will do just that (installs a package from a repository; local or web, I don’t know)

I don’t ever expect much help from level 1 tier support, which is why I ‘try’ to be nice with them. :slight_smile:

Le sigh.

Well, I’ll be installing PS3 Media Server tonight on a new machine I got (an old Core Duo Dell) and hope that the throughput and transcoding will work with a NAS.  I’m having Doctor Who and Torchwood withdrawals! :slight_smile: (took me weeks to rip all my DVDs, I have not watched any DVDs on my PS3, I only stream!)

As for the content:  I ‘have/had’ under 8000 files (not even close to 80,000), approximately 1000 folders, maybe more.

Anyway, I’ll keep this post bumped every so often in the hopes that someone might be able to help me figure it out.  I also hope that by Christmas I might have some extra money to buy myself a nice QNAP with my own drives to work with.  Those qpkg repositories are sweet. :slight_smile:

PEACE

13

Tony: It doesn’t work on my My Book Live at my desk, I see another port in the lsof output… unfortunately I don’t have a DLNA-compliant device over here.  I can affirm that the iTunes server is working (because Banshee and Rhythmbox in Ubuntu automatically detect that and let me stream music) but I can’t honestly affirm that Twonky is working (although it is running).  Thanks for explaining that, though–I forgot lsof does show ports in some instances, too.

machstern: I used to be a Level 2 technician (now I’m an auditor who listens to calls/reads emails from all of our call centers) and the advice you got would be the same even if it were from Level 2 (I even asked a few coworkers over lunch just to make sure).  Level 1’s great for lots of stuff but definitely not for the nitty-gritty internal working sort of thing.  :)  As for Level 2, when there’s a Linux question they usually come and ask me, hehe.

Sounds like the content count seems sane.  You’d be surprised the numbers we hear sometimes!  Seems like a lot of folders, maybe, but I don’t recall what’s been tested as far as maximum folders.

As far as I was ever able to determine, a factory reset writes a default partition scheme and file system to the My Book Live (minus the Public/Software folder contents) and so it basically gets a reference install/configuration/database set of Twonky.  I would be surprised if they use a Debian package to install it and that’s too bad because if they did you could probably hack around and rerun the postinst script for that package and not have to reset everything.  :slight_smile:

My preferred modification would be to install Nethack on my (personal) MBL so I could play from anywhere, but so far I’ve been content with running it from the little $5/month virtual private server I’ve been playing with, so my MBL has been spared thus far.  ;)  While I have SSH enabled on general principle I don’t use it for anything more than running Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab) in Ubuntu and getting a breakdown of what I’m wasting space on at the moment.  :wink:

In any case, I can’t offer help with modifying Twonky, but I will cross my fingers that the problem gets resolved one way or another!  :)  I will add, though, that you should definitely back up those files on another drive somewhere.  I mostly use a WD Elements drive to back up my MBL.  It might be a good investment in general, just aside from being able to factory reset your MBL.

14

So, this is messed up.

I was able to get myself a 2tb WD FW800 drive from work, so I successfully copied all my content over.

I factory reset (the full one) the MBLive2TB and everything was working.

I was copying some files over still, and my PS3 found the Twonky MediaServer.

I watched an episode for about 22mins, it played all the way through.

I was going back and forth looking at the naming of a couple files when it just all of a sudden dropped me, giving me that I have been disconnected from the media server.

The file copying it done now, but Twonky is still down, and I can’t see port 9000.  I’m going to run a reset in a minute, but I’ve just copied over over 1tb of data ALL day today, choking my network, and killing my time.  This just blows.  So frustrating.

My new ubuntu box is almost ready too, gonna run PS3 MediaServer and AirVideo servers (for iPad) and stream directly from the drive.  I am however incredibly disappointed and want my money back.  I’d rather save a little money by not having to worry about Twonky.  Just a plain old NAS.

Sigh.  I doubt that will happen.  Gotta be a way to have Twonky back from the firmware update, so you don’t have to wipe all the data…again.  I’m not going through that again.

Any advice yet?

PEACE

15

And so, the dilemma continues…except now, i require a reboot of my WD so that my ubuntu box can properly mount my info in my fstab file. If I mount using the fstab information (mount -a) or using webmin, i get an error: Failed to save mount : Mount failed : Unable to find suitable address.

This message appears from two different ubuntu boxes, one is a 10.10 server and the other is a 10.10 desktop. I use the desktop for my calibre library and my ps3 media server, so it is kind of essential that my mounts always work.

Until i reset it to factory default, i didn’t have this issue. This box is turning out to being of my biggest wastes of money in a long time. And since i can’t find any way to have my money refunded, it looks as it is a lost cause.

I am going to try and determine WHY i cannot properly mount using my settings, but since it works one minute and not another, i am starting to really justify having spent close to 200$…tough to do.

Any ideas?

16

Oh boy, here we go again…

So, last night my Windows 7 box decided to drop its connection to my shares as well (forgot about this).

I just tried smbclient on my ubuntu box so my error could be a little more precise, and I receive this error:  NT_STATUS_CONNECTION_REFUSED.

Upon further reading I realized this to be a SAMBA issue, SAMBA being what is used to share the folders.

I came upon /var/log/samba/ and checked the .log file (smbd)…and it looks as if my samba service is causing PANICS…sigh.  I didn’t do anything “extra” that I had not done before.

I’ve worked with Debian before, and it worked great.  I’m not sure how well the developers for WD are with linux, but it seems to me that someone is dropping the ball somewhere.

So a recap:

  1. I am forced to back up close to 1.5tb of data from the WDMBL2tb

  2. I run a full factory default, as per several peoples’ mentions that I was SOL

  3. I then configure my network address to its static, set its system name, workgroup is set to workgroup (default)

  4. I create 3 shares, one being for videos

  5. I set the video share to do “media” but limit it to videos

  6. I spend almost two full days transfering 1.5tb back to my WDMBL2tb, using a Xover connection from my Macbook Pro to the drive to eliminate any and all network talk other than my MBP and my WD

  7. I start to watch one episode I made, works great.

  8. I finish the episode, and start to browse (with PS3) the other directories, and I am “disconnected from media server”

  9. Twonky media has now failed…again

  10. I install my ubuntu desktop box and install PS3 Media Server

  11. I set my system to mount and then auto-mount through fstab the share, using my credentials through Nautilus and a credentials file for auto-mount

  12. reboot ubuntu, works great, shares mount, I can watch Doctor Who!

13)  I attempt to transfer my ebooks back to my ebooks share, doesn’t work

14)  one of my nzb services on my ubuntu server stops working, locks right up.  I look at the logs and it states that my directory cannot be found.  A couple logs later, my smb share isn’t mounted any more

  1. trying to force the mount does not work

  2. Try to access my shares using my Windows 7 box, doesn’t work

  3. Try to access my shares using Mac, doesn’t work

  4. set my shares to become public, once again, and it looks like it might work, but I need to reboot the device…AGAIN.

19)  Cry myself to sleep…because I wasted money and time on something that shouldn’t be this difficult

Sigh…again.

17

OK…and now when I ran a afp://server it worked, I had access to my shares from the Mac…but…

After I did, it wanted to authenticate, and succeeded at doing so, to: MyBookLive-tm

Not my device name…what is happening?  :frowning:

EDIT:  Oh, and a reboot of the WD fixes things temporarily…

18

Looks like you found the AFP access that Time Machine on OS X uses to automatically connect to your My Book Live.  It will only allow you to access (or create) a Time Machine backup location on your My Book Live and is not useful for anything you’re trying to do at the moment.

If you do not still have a copy of your data from the My Book Live on a seperate computer, use SFTP to back up the device (this is file transfer via SFTP and is much, much faster than using Samba).  In Nautilus on your desktop machine you can press Ctrl-L to get the location bar and type in ‘sftp://mybooklive.local/’ to access your My Book Live.   Your shares will be under /DataVolume.

If after a full factory reset of the My Book Live you’re still experiencing software crashes then that suggests the firmware wasn’t updated correctly or there might even be a hardware problem with your unit.  I know for a fact that this is not typical of the My Book Live units.  I recommend contacting our technical support and getting a replacement My Book Live.

19

Ok, that first bit makes sense, using AFP.

Once I connect using AFP, I have access to the shares.  As if I was connecting using smb://

I dunno, I reset everything last night and my PS3 MediaServer was able to serve from the WD share again (using transcoding as well actually worked well)

I haven’t touched it since last night, but I’m going to attempt to run a couple services using my mounted directories under both my ubuntu boxes and see what happens.

thanks for the advice

20

I’ve had a similar problem.  For me it turned out that the TwonkyServer (v5.1.9) database became corrupted but the NAS is treated with the utmost care.

Under /CacheVolume/twonkymedia (making sure that the NAS is not attempting to keep enabling the TwonkyService (Disable it by making sure the option is not ticked) rename these two files…

db.info

twonky.db

I keep my kwn personal Knowledgebase and this is the entry I made in it . . .

For some reason TwonkyServer would not start.  Kept on starting and shutting down every time the media server was started.

Solution…

Ensure the NAS is not trying to enable the Twonky media server under the normal Webadmin UI.

Enable SSH and login as root.

cd /CacheVolume/twonkymedia
mv twonky.db PossiblyCorrupt_twonky.db
mv db.info PossiblyCorrupt_db.info

Enable the Twonky media server under the normal Webadmin UI.

(Edit: 31/5/2011 11:12 - Next two actions may not be necessary as Twonky builds the database automagically if it’s not there but you can always login to the Twonky admin UI to reassure yourself it has started and the database is being assembled.)

Login to web interface  (http://MyBookLive:9000/)
Initiate data base rebuilt.

In response to the error…

Log:

15:36:11:024 ** mediaserver starts.**
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /DeviceDescription.xml 3
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /ConnectionManager.xml 3
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /ConnectionManager/Control 4
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /ContentDirectory.xml 3
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /ContentDirectory/Control 4
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /MediaReceiverRegistrar.xml 3
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /MediaReceiverRegistrar/Control 4
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for  8
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for  16
15:36:11:024 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /disk 3
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /httpproxy 3
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /albumart 3
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /configpage 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /config 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /setup 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /images 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /index 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /resources 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /webbrowse 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /cgi-bin 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /bgtrans 3
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /createobject 7
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /rpc 5
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /rss 3
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /mediarss 3
15:36:11:025 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /wii/feed 3
15:36:11:026 LOG_HTTP:upnp_http_register_handler registered a handler for /json/feed/ 3
15:36:11:026 [Info] dbx_init - using database: /CacheVolume/twonkymedia/twonky.db
15:36:11:027 [Error] dbx_query - SQL error: database disk image is malformed
15:36:11:027 sqlError - I/O error occured (11). Checking database location
15:36:11:027 sqlError - regular database corrupted, invoking rebuild
15:36:11:027 LOG_SYSTEM:upnp_init_thread (id=1208349824) with name rpc_stop_server
15:36:11:727 LOG_SYSTEM:upnp_server_stop Server terminated
15:36:11:927 dbx_queue_release called
15:36:11:927 LOG_SYSTEM:file_unlink error (errno=2,filename=/CacheVolume/twonkymedia/twonkymedia-locations.db)
15:36:11:928 LOG_SYSTEM:file_unlink error (errno=2,filename=/CacheVolume/twonkymedia/5.1.9)
15:36:11:928 [Error] dbx_delete_db - called without dbx_open
15:36:11:928 LOG_SCAN: upnp_file_scanner_exit(): In
15:36:11:928 LOG_SCAN: upnp_file_scanner_lock - critical section not initialized
15:36:11:928 LOG_SCAN: upnp_file_scanner_unlock - critical section not initialized
15:36:11:928 LOG_SCAN: upnp_file_scanner_exit - critical section not initialized
15:36:11:928 LOG_SCAN: upnp_file_scanner_exit(): Out
15:36:11:928 LOG_SYSTEM:upnp_cds_actions_release()
15:36:11:929 [Error] dbx_close - called without dbx_open
15:36:11:929 ** mediaserver stops.**