My Cloud disconneted itself from network

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
141

TonyPh12345 wrote:

oldlinuxguy wrote:

 I’m not sure anyone else’s disconnects were caused by this but it seems plausible.

That’d be a severe bug in either your tablet or your router…

 

The router should not re-assign the IP address to anything else until after the lease expires.

 

The tablet should not have re-used the IP address if the lease had expired, it should have requested a new lease.

 

The only way what you’ve seen could happen is if the router did something wrong, or the tablet kept using an old IP address.

I’m not disagreeing that my other equipment did something wrong.

I will say my WD Cloud device has been running just fine since I moved its reserved IP address to the top of the range of the addresses assigned by the router.  That is, in the router config, I reserved an address at the upper end of the range.  I’m using 192.168.123.100-190 and I assigned it 190.  I also reserve an address for the printer and second access point since I don’t want them changing every time I power cycle the system.

 No network drop since I made this change.  It dropped off every night before I made the change.

Since netgear routers and android phones are common devices, I expect this might happen to someone else as well.

142

Hello, this chritsmas I bought my parents a myCloud 2Tb.
It is connected to the home router/switch and it has a static IP assigned to it (reserved).
The device stays connected and visible for all the other wirless devices connected to the LAN.
As soon as i start a bulk transfer from the Windows desktop to the myCloud (backup data) within a couple of minutes the connectivity to the myCloud is lost and the device is no longer discoverable from the network!
I also tried to bulk transfer data connecting directly the myCloud to the Pc (manually assign Ip to both devices in order to allow routability) but the result was the same!
I’m very disappointed and seriously considering to move to apple time capsule!

143

I installed the new firmware on Wednesday evening.  It has now been up for 4 days with no problems.  I’m running with a static IP address with Sleep Mode turned ‘off’.  I’m going to turn Sleep Mode ‘on’ now and see if it keeps working…

144

Not that I want to tease you guys, but I have no issues with loosing connection after I added monitoring crontabs.

I had to move all my WD My Coulds to different location and power strip, so I had to turn them off 22 days ago. They are working still.

WDMyCloud1:~# uptime 
 22:03:08 up 22 days, 11:22, 1 user, load average: 4.74, 5.90, 6.18
WDMyCloud1:~#

WDMyCloud2:~# uptime
 22:03:31 up 22 days, 11:22, 1 user, load average: 3.11, 3.17, 3.44
WDMyCloud2:~# 

WDMyCloud3:~# uptime
 22:03:35 up 22 days, 11:08, 1 user, load average: 3.10, 3.31, 3.54
WDMyCloud3:~#

I am having Crawler being not running often after adding the photos, but I am restarting the processes via SSH without the reboot. I almoust found time to automate that fix as well. I am going to keep my solutions in the signature

145

soaptrail wrote:

soaptrail wrote:

illiniwek wrote:

For novices like me…

 

So I originally reported several failures with my drive, including the familiar “drive disappearing from network”.  It’s been over 2 weeks now, and I can happily report that my drive has been up and running nonstop with no issues.  Static IP, sleep mode off, etc.  I have a couple recomendations and a theory…

 

…Okay, now to my theory… Once I finally got the drive up and running, I copied about 700GB worth of data, using a wired connection.  Music, movies, documents, everything.  This was a long process, but I took my time.  I noticed that the “content scan” never seemed to finish and was bogging down the drive.  I assumed because i just moved thousands and thousands of files to the drive that it would eventually catch up after a few hours.  Not the case.  It took many many days.  And throughout that time the drive would frequently disappear from the network.  I tried resetting, factory restoring, etc.  Nothing helped.  To get the drive back i’d have to unplug and plug back in.  Then it would be up for a few hours before losing it again.  So I got frustrated and just let it alone…

 

After about 4 days of this the drive just… works.  Content scan is finished.  Files are all there, accessible, and no more disconnecting.  I assume this content scan is cataloging the files for faster file sharing, and if you throw a billion files at it all at once, it will take a LONG time to complete.  And in the meantime, the drive will be slow and possibly unresponsive. 

 

Maybe one of the more expert networking guys on this forum can comment on this?  The content scan seems to be at the root of the problem, unless you have a hardware failure of course (in which case you need to ruse that warranty).  Does this have something to do with the IPv6 thing someone discussed?  I thought I saw someone else mention something about a stopping a windows background process that conflicted with the drive’s content scan, can’t seem to find that message now…

 

Good luck everyone!

You might be on to something since I too had disconnects after copying 700+ GB last thursday and now the last 2 days i have not had any disconnects. The only setting i did change was to put this NAS as a static IP of 192.168.1.2.  With a dual core scanning the media should not cause an unresponsive box, but for several days the light was blue but i could not connect without a reboot.  And now i can connect without issues.  But 2 days is short so we will see if it continues to connect.

3 days later and I still have not had it disconnect, so I think for my instance it had to do with twonky scanning the drive after copying an enormous amount of data.

I had exactly the same problem. scanning was always stuck at 98% for my photo folder and my device disconnected a few hours after reboot. My daily safepoint did not work either due to the disconnect issue.  After I deleted my photo folder the scan finished successfully. since then my device has not disconnected.Then I copied my photos back and my device continues to work with no issues. My daily safepoint also works properly every night. I am pretty sure the disconnect issue is gone now. Hopefully my experience will help solve other people’s issue.

146

I previously reported success avoiding disconnects using a modified version of Pavel’s crontab solution. This is an update after the recent firmware upgrade. Recapping my experience trying to resolve frequent network disconnects:

  1. Newly purchased WD My Cloud disconnects from network every 3-4 hours requiring hard reboot.

  2. Disabled sleep mode - disconnects continue requiring hard reboot.

  3. Static IP - disconnects continue.

  4. Installation of crontab at 5 minute interval - disconnects continue.

  5. Installation of crontab at 1 minute interval - no disconnects. Connection maintained 3+ weeks.

  6. Removal of 1 min crontab as a test resulted in a disconnect within several hours. Re-install crontab - no disconnects.

  7. Upgrade to latest firmware v03.03.01-156, crontab removed during upgrade - disconnect within 4 hours!!!

  8. Reinstall 1 min crontab - no disconnects 3+ days.

I have no explanation for why the 5 min interval was unsuccessful at preventing disconnects but the 1 min crontab works flawlessly. I plan to experiment with different time intervals.

I am very much a novice who benefitted from the detailed posts of others. Hopefully my step-by-step will be useful to someone else. 

  • enable SSH in Dashboard Settings > Network

  • google then download puTTy.exe

  • run puTTy, enter the IP for the My Cloud, check SSH, click Open.

  • accept the security disclaimer. You only see this the first login.

  • login in as ‘root’ with default pw ‘welc0me’ (that’s a zero).

  • at command prompt enter ‘crontab -e’

  • arrow down to first blank line and enter: 

            • date >>/DataVolume/shares/Public/date.txt 2>&1

  • make sure there is a space between the *'s, between the last * and ‘date’, after ‘date’, and before ‘2>&1’.

  • CTRL-o to save

  • CTRL-x to exit edit mode.

  • exit to close putty.

A very small file will be created in your Public folder and will be updated every minute. Hope this helps someone.

4 Likes
147

Steve511,  

Your approach of using puTTy.exe is working like a charm!!! I had turned the sleep setting off, set a reserved IP on my router, and tried nearly everything else suggested on this forum to resolve having MyCloud drive disconnect about every two hours without fixing the problem, which was frustrating to say the least.  I had been having issues for several weeks, and the 1/7/14 firmware update that was automatically installed didn’t change anything either.

I installed puTTY.exe and ran according to your instructions and BAM, up now for 14 hours (7 times longer than “normal”) and stability is great so far. Not even a hint of network issue. 

Great idea! I assume that until WD gets this issue permanently resolved that I’ll need to restart puTTy.exe after a reboot, which is no big deal at all if the drives now functions as intended…  Many thanks!

148

hey steve, even with the cron working, do you have the sleep on or off? or is it independent?

Also, do we need to follow your steps everytime the cloud reboots? or only once?

Thanks,

149

Hi emasan,

you don’t need to repeat steve’s steps every time your cloud is rebooted. crontab automatically starts itself.

150

noob here.

I’ve been watching this thread because I’ve been having the same problem.

I wanted to add my $0.02.

I have a USB hub with 3 drives connected to the MyCloud (3TB).

When I disconnect the hub the problem seems to have stopped.

It’s been up for 24 hours so far (longest stretch ever).

151

This is really strange. I’ve had two mycloud 3 TB drives for over few months now. I’ve never seen this disconnection prolem or the fact the drive does not go to sleep.

i would think that keeping the drive from sleeping is just going to wear it down sooner than intended.

Im still on the previous FW: 03.01.04-139

I would like to add that my drives are pretty modified in the sense that i’ve installed Transmission client on it. i also run a WHOLE bunch of cron jobs, i even have one drive setup as a rsync server etc… yet my drives go into standy by mode normally.

Is it worth pointing out that i have disabled, Itunes and twonly server.

I also keep the MEDIACRAWER thing disabled. it’s only started for 8 hours via cronjobs at midnight on Mon, Wed and Sun.

152

thank eric,

one more question, does this cron function allow the drive to sleep? or with this cron working the drive never sleeps and that is what avoids the cloud to freeze…

thanks

153

Hi emasan,

well, I disabled sleep mode on my own cloud device, so I don’t know answer for your question. Try it yourself and let me know :slight_smile:

154

From what I could understand the hdd never sleeps with the cron option…

that is why the cloud never freezes…

this cron pretty much just prevents the drive to go to sleep mode.

I’m going back to put sleep mode off until a new firmware update comes out.

thanks

155

I have mine non-sleeping and it has been up for a few days.

156

I have had my unit for a couple of weeks and the problem just started this weekend. No settings have been changed in my system. I see there was a firmware update on January 9th. Apparently this did not address the issue. I will try disabling the sleep mode. Disappointing.

157

I just got a new 4TB MyCloud and also ran into the disconnect problem. I suspect the machine simply crashed hard, i.e. ran into a Linux kernel corruption. After rebooting I dug around the logs a little and noticed that, under heavy load (files being copied next to a content scan/twonky and WD’s media crawler running) the machine seems to run out of virtual (not physical) memory. If you look into /var/log/kern.log you should see "page allocation failure"s popping up. (looking closer this appeared for random apps such as afpd, twonkyserver, convert, etc.). This seems to confirm what some other posters have pointed out, i.e that crashes/disconnects have to do with heave loads.

I dug a little deeper and it seems the way the kernel is configured is a bit unusual. There is a parameter for setting how much memory the kernel reserves for some of its internal operations. WD sets it to its lowest value of ‘1 1’ (while Linux default is ‘256 32’). You can look at the value of the parameter via:

  cat /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_ratio

If the value is too low, the kernel has enough memory reserved for itself, but regular applications may run out. Conversely, if it is set too high, the kernel may not get enough memory in critical situations. It seems correct that the default (256 32) would be too low for an embedded box like this (which doesn’t have a **bleep** lot of memory), but setting it all the way to the lowest value can exactly lead to the page allocation failures that regular apps are seeing on this machine now.

What I did on my box is to set the parameter to some higher value. For now:

  echo ‘16 16’ > /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_ratio

You can see the effect of the change on how many pages are protected in the “protection:” entries under

  cat /proc/zoneinfo

The change can be made persistent across reboots by editing the corresponding entry in /etc/sysctl.conf.

I am still experimenting, but for the time being I haven’t see any new page failures (even when stress testing under heavy load). For those of you with older firmwares, I am wondering whether WD modified the lowmem_reserve_ratio setting there? I am running the latest firmware. Note that there may still be other issues, e.g. related to sleeping, but I didn’t notice anything that would point to that for me. I have sleeping enabled, i.e. running with default settings otherwise.

With any of these changes: use at your own risk! Setting the parameter too high can result in the machine already crashing during boot, i.e. not coming up at all again…

1 Like
158

I seem to have the same issue.

The drive had been just dropping off my network every once in a while…every few hours.

Changed Drive to Static IP on network.  Seemed to stay up.

Was good for a while.  Now, this past weekend, I lost connectivity to it again.  Has not come back.  Will be rebooting it tonight.

 Drive is a 3 TB MyCloud drive.  Bought it right before Christmas.

159

@LinAdmin, well, the box is not really running out of memory. From looking at the logs, there is actually plenty of physical and swap memory left when the allocation failures happen. Just the kernel is not able to make use of it in some critical situations. That is a complicated subject, but a question of tuning parameters. For an overview, see:

   http://mariosmarduch.ulitzer.com/node/431838/mobile

Apart from crashes, little memory coupled with mistuning can obviously also lead to excessive swapping, i.e. performance issues. My setup is actually a bit strange and bottlenecks are in my network, not the MyCloud itself. So I never tested speed. Can you try changing the lowmem_reserve_ratio to see whether it helps any?

In any case, simply giving the box more RAM would msot likely help to alleviate or avoid many of these problems in the first place.

160

Here’s a huge thank you and compliments to agerstia

specifically for post 157.

My experience with My Cloud…

Currently about a month - no disconnects

similarly before that for about three weeks -  no disconnects

Vanilla factory settings.  My use of the My Cloud is light, little load on it.

I’ve followed this forum because in my first week, I had 4 disconnects.

People have suggested

sleep mode, static IP, cron jobs, more?

but I haven’t seen any understanding of a cause of the problems.

agerstia appears to have a real understanding

and a proposed “try it”.

I’ve made the “lowmem_reserve_ratio” change.   We’ll see.

Wishful thinking:  agerstia if you could use your skill to improve the safepoint transfer rate…

I see about 10 MB / sec.    Over a USB 3 port to a USB 3 My Book.

Pitiful.

Anyway,  Thanks again.   

rrkaiser