One of all Clients cannot connect to radiostation

[otto_unnormalverbraucher]

Hi all,

as being new to the forum I hope, that I post to the correct section. If not so, please redirect this post.

I am running a multiroom system built with several Raspberry Pi and several Logitech UE Smart Radios. The Squeezebox Server runs on a Pi and the Pi's all run Max2Play with HiFiBerry AMP2-Cards. The system is up and running for ten month now.
All Pi's are configured identical (As far as I can tell)
I am currently investigating a problem which occurs while trying to play a radio-station (opml.radiotime.com/Tune.ashx?id=s42828&partnerId=16&username=won'tsay]). It is the german Deutschlandfunk, the nationwide Info-radio.

My problem describes as follows:

• All machines can play the station at any time.
• One machine (Raspi-bathroom) plays the station if just rebooted.
• After some time bathroom cannot connect to the station anymore, displaying the message (connection is no longer able to work).
• If this is the case, the other machines can connect to the station and play it.
• If I synchronize bathroom with any other machine playing the station, it will play in sync with it.
• If I play other stations there are no problems.
• If I try to ping bathroom, I cannot reach it.
• I wrote a bash-script, that's running on bathroom every 5 minutes as a cron process. The script checks WiFi-strength and pings the internet. If it detects, that it cannot reach the net, it reboots the pi and tests again. Although the pi cannot be pinged from my local lan, it does not reboot, and the script logs show, that the script pings google every 5 minutes successfully.
• If I hard-reset the pi, by pulling the power-plug, it can play the station again.

What I tried up to now:
I reinstalled the OS from a freshly downloaded image and configured the raspi to work again. --> Two days later the problem occurred again.
I wrote the aforementioned script, which indeed sometimes reboots the raspi, if it does not successfully ping the internet. BTW, the other raspis also run the identical script and work perfectly, so I rule out, that it might be the script doing the damage.

At first I thought, it has something to do with the stream-URL being wrong, but the other machines work fine with it and it is defined as a favourite on the server and thus identical for all players.

This problem drives me nuts, because I am not able to narrow it down to a special reason.
If anyone could point me in a special direction, help is greatly appreciated.

[kidstypike]

Swap the bathroom player with another of your players with similar specs and compare?

[bpa]

What version of squeezelite is in the Pi's especially the one in Bathroom ?

There have been a lot of bug fixes in squeezelite in the last 10 months.
Latest version is 1.9.7.1280 (minor ?)

BTW Also you can get a better quality stream from the station web pages.

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/livestream.2396.de.html

[bpa]

Swap the bathroom player with another of your players with similar specs and compare?

This is a good ideas as it will show if problem is related to location of bathroom pi or the bathroom-pi hardware itself.

For example, wifi signal are affected by water so if the signal path between Pi and router is through cistern, shower etc. Signal variation may be affecting playback.

[otto_unnormalverbraucher]

Thanks kidstypike and bpa for the quick reply.
I will first try to change the stream and swap the pis if the problem does not go away. I'll report back the result, but it will take a while, since when rebooted, it takes the pi some time to show the problem.

[otto_unnormalverbraucher]

Ok, I swapped the Pis including SD-cards and the problem persisted, where it occurred before. This indicates, it is not the hardware, that is causing the Problem.

As bpa suggested, I checked the squeezelite-version:

apt-cache showpkg squeezelite
Package: squeezelite
Versions: 
1.8-4.1+b1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/raspbian.raspberrypi.org_raspbian_dists_buster_main_binary-armhf_Packages)
 Description Language: 
                 File: /var/lib/apt/lists/raspbian.raspberrypi.org_raspbian_dists_buster_main_binary-armhf_Packages
                  MD5: 57dea76939e1584f158024002e6843a7


Reverse Depends: 
  squeezelite-pa,squeezelite
Dependencies: 
1.8-4.1+b1 - lsb-base (0 (null)) libasound2 (2 1.0.16) libavcodec58 (18 7:4.0) libavcodec-extra58 (2 7:4.0) libavformat58 (2 7:4.0) libavutil56 (2 7:4.0) libc6 (2 2.15) libfaad2 (2 2.7) libflac8 (2 1.3.0) liblirc-client0 (0 (null)) libmad0 (2 0.15.1b-3) libmpg123-0 (2 1.10.0) libsoxr0 (2 0.1.0) libvorbisfile3 (2 1.1.2) squeezelite-pa (0 (null)) 
Provides: 
1.8-4.1+b1 - 
Reverse Provides: 
squeezelite-pa 1.8-4.1+b1 (= )

So this is an older version of the package. The raspis run the Max2play system and I will crosscheck with the people working there, if they recommend to upgrade.

Next, I investigated the WiFi quality. It turns out, that the connection is always cycling around the values shown below:

cat /proc/net/wireless
Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               | Missed | WE
 face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc | beacon | 22
 wlan0: 0000   48.  -62.  -256        0      0      0      0      0        0

I attached a ZIP-file containing a LibreOffice sheet, with the data of some days of monitoring.

However there is an exception: The retry values begin to rise after the pi is up for some hours, sometimes going up to 34 retries, which is strange. If the pi is rebooted, the values drop immediately to zero. At first glance this seems to be a good candidate, explaining why the raspi has problems playing the mentioned station, but several other hints point away:
If the pi cannot play the station,

• it is sufficient to synchronize it with another unit and it wil play the station again. This is the case, even if I switch the other machine off.
• I can administrate the pi through ssh and ping the local network, but not (!) the internet. Neither IP-address nor clear name work. (So this does not seem to be a DNS-Problem)
• If I use the Max2play Web-GUI it can connect to the machine, but the GUI indicates, that it has no internet access.

All the above things go away, if I reboot the pi. It can play the station then, ping the internet and the retry values drop to zero.

It seems to me, that the pi after some time "forgets" how to access the internet and I still have no idea of a reason for this.

[d6jg]

Ok, I swapped the Pis including SD-cards and the problem persisted, where it occurred before. This indicates, it is not the hardware, that is causing the Problem.

As bpa suggested, I checked the squeezelite-version:

apt-cache showpkg squeezelite
Package: squeezelite
Versions: 
1.8-4.1+b1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/raspbian.raspberrypi.org_raspbian_dists_buster_main_binary-armhf_Packages)
 Description Language: 
                 File: /var/lib/apt/lists/raspbian.raspberrypi.org_raspbian_dists_buster_main_binary-armhf_Packages
                  MD5: 57dea76939e1584f158024002e6843a7


Reverse Depends: 
  squeezelite-pa,squeezelite
Dependencies: 
1.8-4.1+b1 - lsb-base (0 (null)) libasound2 (2 1.0.16) libavcodec58 (18 7:4.0) libavcodec-extra58 (2 7:4.0) libavformat58 (2 7:4.0) libavutil56 (2 7:4.0) libc6 (2 2.15) libfaad2 (2 2.7) libflac8 (2 1.3.0) liblirc-client0 (0 (null)) libmad0 (2 0.15.1b-3) libmpg123-0 (2 1.10.0) libsoxr0 (2 0.1.0) libvorbisfile3 (2 1.1.2) squeezelite-pa (0 (null)) 
Provides: 
1.8-4.1+b1 - 
Reverse Provides: 
squeezelite-pa 1.8-4.1+b1 (= )

So this is an older version of the package. The raspis run the Max2play system and I will crosscheck with the people working there, if they recommend to upgrade.

Next, I investigated the WiFi quality. It turns out, that the connection is always cycling around the values shown below:

cat /proc/net/wireless
Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               | Missed | WE
 face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc | beacon | 22
 wlan0: 0000   48.  -62.  -256        0      0      0      0      0        0

I attached a ZIP-file containing a LibreOffice sheet, with the data of some days of monitoring.

However there is an exception: The retry values begin to rise after the pi is up for some hours, sometimes going up to 34 retries, which is strange. If the pi is rebooted, the values drop immediately to zero. At first glance this seems to be a good candidate, explaining why the raspi has problems playing the mentioned station, but several other hints point away:
If the pi cannot play the station,

• it is sufficient to synchronize it with another unit and it wil play the station again. This is the case, even if I switch the other machine off.
• I can administrate the pi through ssh and ping the local network, but not (!) the internet. Neither IP-address nor clear name work. (So this does not seem to be a DNS-Problem)
• If I use the Max2play Web-GUI it can connect to the machine, but the GUI indicates, that it has no internet access.

All the above things go away, if I reboot the pi. It can play the station then, ping the internet and the retry values drop to zero.

It seems to me, that the pi after some time "forgets" how to access the internet and I still have no idea of a reason for this.

Clearly it’s a network related problem. Are all Pi’s on WiFi?
Are all connected to the same AP/Router?
As you have swapped them around you can rule out hardware and this appears to be location specific. Is something interfering with the WiFI?

[bpa]

Package: squeezelite
Versions:
1.8-4.1+b1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/raspbian.raspberrypi.org_raspbian_dists_buster_mai n_binary-armhf_Packages)

For the record. This is very old from Nov 2016 - many many bugs fixed since then.

[bpa]

It seems to me, that the pi after some time "forgets" how to access the internet and I still have no idea of a reason for this.

What model Pi is this ?
What model router ?

I have a new Pi4 running Buster with LMS 8.0 and it drops off the WLAN every so often even though wifi says it is up. I haven't found root cause (but there are others with wifi problems on Pi4). I think it seem to be some incompatibility with my Netgear Orbi mesh router.

[mrw]

Ok, I swapped the Pis including SD-cards and the problem persisted, where it occurred before. This indicates, it is not the hardware, that is causing the Problem.

Do I understand you to mean that the problem is in the bathroom ?

Next, I investigated the WiFi quality. It turns out, that the connection is always cycling around the values shown below:

cat /proc/net/wireless
Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               | Missed | WE
 face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc | beacon | 22
 wlan0: 0000   48.  -62.  -256        0      0      0      0      0        0

I attached a ZIP-file containing a LibreOffice sheet, with the data of some days of monitoring.

I have found that a signal 'level' consistently better than -60 (i.e. in the -50s) is good for my wifi health and my frustration level. Levels at the higher -60s and -70s seem to give rise to intermittent connectivity/discovery problems, and you do seem to have some flurries of that in the spreadsheet. What do the statistics show in a "good" location ?
(Note: in your data 'link' = 110 + 'level', you plotted 'link'.)

If the problem is as simple as relatively poor signal strength, then perhaps an antenna would help.

I bought myself a USB wifi adapter with antenna to overcome a, possibly similar, problem in my back bedroom. It did the trick.
One of these: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282579709602