Alarm let me down this morning

[digitaria]

Yesterday I changed my wireless security from WEP to WPA2.

This morning, the alarm - which is set to a radio station - failed to sound and I was half an hour late for work. The radio stream was stuck on "buffering", at 20%.

Eventually the Boom was coaxed into life, but I'll have to set a contingency alarm for tomorrow morning.

[dmwiley]

Always wise to have a backup plan.

[toby10]

Could be a number of things including a station problem. I run WPA2 on my Boom without a hiccup.
I highly doubt WPA2 is the issue here.

[snarlydwarf]

Sounds like there is a failure mode that has previously not been detected: play a net radio station, but get stuck in the initial buffering.... SBS thinks your boom is fine and dandy connected, but really the boom is stuck waiting for a packet that got dropped somewhere along the line and not showing any signs of coming home.

Perhaps that packet got lost in the wireless link, but really it could be anywhere, it worked 'enough' that sbs thinks you're working, though, so it doesn't kick in the fallback. but not enough for the stream to actually start playing.

interesting failure mode. could probably reproduce it by carefully timing dropped links or playing with firewall rules to drop packets after a bit.

[Mnyb]

Yes boom has an unfortunate property to go quiet after a timeout in the playing channel sometimes, even when listening normally so sometimes you press pause and play to kick the channel into action .
Sometimes it does what it should buffer up wait and continue, when it get enough data and what ever caused the time out has ceased.

Very likely something on the internet, like right now I'm trying to hear
"boot liquor - SOMA FM (alt country)" via a completely wired system and a 100MB internet line and things go quiet after a time out Ie the channel seems to play, information on the screen but no audio .
Folk alley plays just fine on the other hand so in this moment in time "boot liquor - SOMA FM (alt country)" has trouble streaming to me.

The flaw in the fallback mechanism in BOOM is that it does not check if there is actual audio going to the speakers, to kick of the backup sound.

What to do ?, use a channel that is very reliable, so this is very unlikely to happen.

Use you local songs for alarm, if possible .

Boom have yet to fail to wake me up, but if important like catching a flight I do set up my cell phone and next time also my Squeezebox Radio as backup too .

I have a local server, but as boom is dependent on external servers (my own or mysb.com) the reliability can never equal a system where all alarm functions are on the same device .

Actually when the dev straighten out the Radio's alarm function, it has the potential to be much more reliable than BOOM ever can be as it has an onboard battery so it sounds even during power outtakes, just like your cell phones alarm.
It may actually be there in some respects already, it do wake people up, but to often to the backup tune :-/

Another fail scenario for both boom and radio would be a perfectly valid stream but the channel is sending nothing but silence ? for some reason.

The BOOM's own backup sound, do wake you up too i get that when my server thinks it's time the check harddrives on a weekday

[digitaria]

Thanks for the input. Same story again this morning - but this time stuck at 10% (and this time I had a backup alarm!). The station is BBC Radio 4, so not something obscure. The router is close to the Boom - so wireless signal is strong. I set the alarm again for 5 minutes later and this time it worked. It seems that the fact that the server has been idle for a while makes this problem more likely - it always seems to work when I test it during the day. I wonder if connecting the Boom to mysqueezebox.com will make any difference.