Stops during playback from NFS Share

[sambrereton]

Hi everyone, I have been dealing with this issue without any resolution since I purchased my WD Live Streaming Media Player in 2012.

It is a WD Live TV Generation 3 (Streaming Player).

During playback from a NFS Share it will intermittently stop playback, returning to the menu. When reselecting the file that was playing, it will start off from the beginning rather than ask whether I would like to continue from where it left off. It does not seem to do it in an exact spot nor in any particular size file.

This issue is very annoying and I can’t seem to find any resolution for it. I’ve tried setting a static IP address and using the wired interface to no avail.

Interestingly, while monitoring the ethernet port via port mirroring and analyzing the data in Wireshark, I get the following error (NFS3ERR_NOENT)

http://i.imgur.com/W7gtYir.png

Any ideas that could possibly point me in the right direction?

Thanks.

[TonyPh12345]

Based on your filter, you can’t tell.

The error says (Next to the red arrow)  “CALL IN 754091”.  That means the error is in response to whatever is in that packet, but that packet is filtered out.

Same for all the other errors; the request packets are not visible.

[ncarver]

Would be helpful to know what OS and NFS you are using on server, general network setup info and topology, IP addresses of devices on your network, etc.

Wireshark documentation on NFS is here:

http://wiki.wireshark.org/Network_File_System

Looks like you can set Preferences for NFS that might provide more info on files being accessed–see that section on the help page above.

There also is a link on the help page to the NFS protocol spec/rfc:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1813.txt

A quick search for NFS3ERR_NOENT gives:

No such file or directory. The file or directory name specified does not exist.

[sambrereton]

Thanks for the replies guys.

The server is a CentOS 6.4 server on an ESXI host. It is running the stock standard NFS server/client included with CentOS. I am streaming content off a Western Digital 2TB Hard Drive connected to the server.

Those errors that I pointed out in the Wireshark log happened the second that the playback abruptly stopped. Leading me to believe that there is either an issue in the WD firmware regarding NFS, or the server. Considering that I have no trouble with NFS shares in XBMC on a Raspberry Pi, it leads me to believe that it is an issue with the WD Live firmware.

Switching to CIFS/SMB seems to resolve the problem, but me being a nitpicky person I liked NFS better.

Cheers guys.

[ncarver]

I use Samba (SMB) to share out files from my Linux server, and haven’t ever had any reason to try NFS, so cannot say for sure that Linux NFS functions perfectly with the SMPs.  I frankly prefer using Samba to NFS for serving videos to the SMP because of its flexibility.  For example, I have a Movies share and a TV share that each combine all the movies and TV shows from three 3 TB external drives.  This is accomplish by having the shares consist of symlinks to the actual files, and then setting Samba to follow symlinks across drives.  Samba also allows me to easily control which files are browseable anonymously and which are read-only/writable, all from a single configuration file (vs having to deal with permissions across numerous directories and files).  So I don’t think you should consider Samba as inferior to NFS at all.

[KAD79]

with the most recent firmware there’s been big NFS changes, in general they should result in a more stable connection

NFS now used TCP instead of UDP

see here’s what I see in /proc/mounts

192.168.1.123:/media/Aufs/Action /tmp/media/nfs/192.168.1.123/Action nfs rw,relatime,vers=3,rsize=262144,wsize=262144,namlen=255,hard,nolock,proto=tcp,port=65535,timeo=70,retrans=3,sec=sys,mountport=65535,mountproto=,addr=192.168.1.123 0 0

 in general at least for me NFS has been very stable, and this current release just improves the stability

in ubuntu server starting with 13.04

export of aufs directories is supported

as an example that mount I list above Action, is actually comprised of 3 different hard drives