Announce: CastBridge = integrate Chromecast players with LMS (squeeze2cast)

[edw5]

Sent you a log via PM.

Bringing this conversation back to the forum.

There is definitely something about my system that impacts the chromecast bridge but not the upnp bridge (or anything else, as far as I can tell), but I'm no longer confident that it started with bridge version 2.2.3. Due to the length of time the bridge takes to fail, it turns out that one of the 1.8.x releases is the last version that I know with confidence worked for me.

I'm trying various bridge versions in an attempt to figure out which version introduced the failure I'm seeing, but it's a time-consuming process.

[philippe_44]

It’s really difficult to guess what can be that 5 days issue. Maybe a DHCP (the IP address given to your machine) lease expires and a different address is given. Have you set anything about network interface in the plugin config? Maybe you can look at the IP address of the machine before rebooting and after rebooting it.

What you see in the log is that every 2 minutes, the mDNS search calls the application whether it has found something or not. And it never finds anything in your case.

[piert]

Unfortunately, it happened to me too again, lost all chormecasts. Came back after reboot.

[SamY]

It’s really difficult to guess what can be that 5 days issue. Maybe a DHCP (the IP address given to your machine) lease expires and a different address is given. Have you set anything about network interface in the plugin config? Maybe you can look at the IP address of the machine before rebooting and after rebooting it.

What you see in the log is that every 2 minutes, the mDNS search calls the application whether it has found something or not. And it never finds anything in your case.

The IP address is statically defined in the router and therefore never changes. As always, rebooting the machine resolved the problem, at least for the next 5 days. Any other ideas for how to resolve this are welcomed.

[bwaldron]

The IP address is statically defined in the router and therefore never changes. As always, rebooting the machine resolved the problem, at least for the next 5 days. Any other ideas for how to resolve this are welcomed.

I wish I had ideas! I can only add that I have not (yet?) seen this issue with the bridge on my Windows 10 LMS server.

[SamY]

I wish I had ideas! I can only add that I have not (yet?) seen this issue with the bridge on my Windows 10 LMS server.

Thanks for the feedback. Can I assume that you regularly go more than 5 days without a reboot? It seems like that is the limit for me. How about the IP address? Do you use a static one or is it assigned dynamically (DHCP)?

[edw5]

The IP address is statically defined in the router and therefore never changes. As always, rebooting the machine resolved the problem, at least for the next 5 days. Any other ideas for how to resolve this are welcomed.

Do you know what the length of the DHCP lease your router grants is? I still have a lot of tests to run, as I described above, but when the bridge does fail for me it always fails in less than 48 hours, and my router grants 48 hour leases. My setup is similar to yours, in that I have a static IP reservation in my router, so the machine hosting my LMS is still using DHCP.

Maybe I'm way off base, but I wonder if something fails when the lease needs to be renewed.

[SamY]

Do you know what the length of the DHCP lease your router grants is? I still have a lot of tests to run, as I described above, but when the bridge does fail for me it always fails in less than 48 hours, and my router grants 48 hour leases. My setup is similar to yours, in that I have a static IP reservation in my router, so the machine hosting my LMS is still using DHCP.

Maybe I'm way off base, but I wonder if something fails when the lease needs to be renewed.

According to my Netgear router's administration menu, it renews its lease every two hours. I manually renewed it just now to see if it had any effect but found none. I've heard others mention the possibility of lease renewal being associated with this problem but it doesn't seem to be the case here. Can you manually renew the lease for your router and see what happens?

[edw5]

According to my Netgear router's administration menu, it renews its lease every two hours. I manually renewed it just now to see if it had any effect but found none. I've heard others mention the possibility of lease renewal being associated with this problem but it doesn't seem to be the case here. Can you manually renew the lease for your router and see what happens?

I don't think I can. My router comes from my ISP, and although I can view its settings almost everything is locked down; my server is a Synology NAS, and I don't know how to do a release/renew on that. Even if I rebooted the entire thing, which isn't really practical for a variety of reasons, it wouldn't actually force a renew on demand while the bridge runs.

[bwaldron]

Thanks for the feedback. Can I assume that you regularly go more than 5 days without a reboot? It seems like that is the limit for me. How about the IP address? Do you use a static one or is it assigned dynamically (DHCP)?

My PC is typically rebooted every few weeks to a month. My cast devices (a mix of Chromecast Audios, a Nest Mini, and a Grace Mondo Elite radio) are DHCP (my most-often used have reserved addresses on the router to be "static").

[philippe_44]

For Windows user, you know that Win10 has this terrible habit of scheduling reboots at night all the time and most people don’t even notice it. There long threads of infuriated people about that because when you have a complex system that runs many apps that you want to stay open (a dev setup) it drives you nuts to see your config and work smoked during night

[SamY]

For Windows user, you know that Win10 has this terrible habit of scheduling reboots at night all the time and most people don’t even notice it. There long threads of infuriated people about that because when you have a complex system that runs many apps that you want to stay open (a dev setup) it drives you nuts to see your config and work smoked during night

I believe there are ways to control that behavior. Actually, if mine would reboot itself every four nights at around 3 am, it would 'fix' my problem.

[SamY]

My PC is typically rebooted every few weeks to a month. My cast devices (a mix of Chromecast Audios, a Nest Mini, and a Grace Mondo Elite radio) are DHCP (my most-often used have reserved addresses on the router to be "static").

How about the IP address of your PC? Is it static too?

[bwaldron]

For Windows user, you know that Win10 has this terrible habit of scheduling reboots at night all the time and most people don’t even notice it. There long threads of infuriated people about that because when you have a complex system that runs many apps that you want to stay open (a dev setup) it drives you nuts to see your config and work smoked during night

My PC (an Intel NUC) runs 24/7 and I luckily haven't had that happen, to be honest. You can configure Windows Update to turn off reboots when required for an update, and that's worked for me (though I wouldn't trust it in any mission-critical situation).

[bwaldron]

How about the IP address of your PC? Is it static too?

Yes. It's an actual static address.