Hi All,



At HR Chelmsford whenever the myriad pc either gets turned on or the application is closed and restarted up the myriad in the other studio freezes either for a short time or freezes and stops the audio playing.



Has anyone had this problem before. I know David Boulton mentioned something about Broadcom NIC cards in a previous posting but don't know if it has these side effects.



ta - M

Matt Wade
Need Training or Consultancy for Broadcast Radio Software Products?
Get in touch
w: https://mattwadeonline.co.uk
e: training@mattwadeonline.co.uk

sorry for the delay Matt, this post seems to have passed me by, have a look at this:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/thenakedmvp/archive/2007/01/06/how-broadcom-and-dell-wasted-three-days-of-my-time.aspx

Regards

David Boulton
Brand Manager
Broadcast Radio Ltd

Hi - I can't really figure out exactly what the posts are talking about in the link.



Does anyone else have any ideas of what is happening which causes the other myriad to freeze for a while after we have shutdown a PC in another studio?



ta - M

Matt Wade
Need Training or Consultancy for Broadcast Radio Software Products?
Get in touch
w: https://mattwadeonline.co.uk
e: training@mattwadeonline.co.uk

Matt...



We thought we were the only ones! It's comforting to know we're not!



I am regularly left notes, about once maybe twice a week, telling me that Myriad has 'stalled' for between anything between 30-60 seconds by one or another presenter and I've not been able to reproduce the issue. That was until recently when I was on station and presenting a programme and therefore using Myriad in anger ☺ As the IT/Eng I thought I'd do a quick software update on the Studio2 Myriad PC, while the place was quite. I set the machine to restart and then silence... Myriad in Studio1 had frozen mid song, and checking the Myriad PC in the rack it too had stalled. Both quickly returned after 20-40 seconds and Myriad in Studio1 just picked up from where it had stopped.



I had long suspected that it might have been down to network traffic and presenters try to do two many thing at once. The Myriad PCs are locked out of IE/Firefox, etc. so presenters can't surf the web or check email on these machines. They can, however, run their Facebook page, email, surf the web, have our Trafficlink pages, IRN Newsroom, Sky News, Met Office, etc. etc. on the second PC in the studios.



Here’s a quick overview of our LAN/WAN. BT Business ADSL Router (no Wifi enable) into a 3Com 48port 1000/100/10Mbs intelligent hub. Cat5 cabling around building. IBM server (Admin/email) connected to 1000mb port1, Dell Poweredge server (Myriad Audio store) connected to 1000mbx port2 on the 3Com hub. Myriad PCs 1, 2 & 3 patched to ports 1, 2, & 3 on 3Com at 100Mbs. All other broadcast critical PCs connected on ports 5, 6 & 7, the remaining PC/Laptops and Wifi Access point connected to 3Com hub from ports 10 upwards. All PC have drives accessible to them at start up using the UNC mapping method, Myriad PCs reference only those directories and folder that they require to operate, other PC have access to users personal folders, shared admin and audio folders on the respective servers, logger archive folder, audio archive, etc., etc. operating systems are Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 for both servers, Windows XP Pro SP3 on all PC/Laptop.

We allow remote voice tracking and there is a remote ‘studio/office’ accessing the system via VPN, again with full access to everything as if the user was on station. We also VPN in via an O2 broadband dongle from OBs too.



Reading the post from David above and the external link, the only PC we have running a Broadcom NIC is our Dell Poweredge! Our four Hp/Compaq have Broadcom Wifi mini-PCI but not NIC.



I’m at still at a lose as to why it stalls…, unless it got something to do with users personal folders syncing on shutdown?



I was going to ask our IT support, who sourced all our kit (its recycled stuff from a corporate upgrade and is about 3years old; software included!) about connecting the Myriad PCs via fibre optical links as our 3Com allows for this just to see if that stops the stalling. We did discuss this but ruled it our as being over the top engineering when we re-engineered our network to run Myriad.



Roger.

Roger Woods
Producer/Presenter/Engineer

Have you got any problems auto updating this can cause myriad to skip etc

John

Bay Trust Radio

Hi John,

No, as Wayland has a SBS2003, I've switch off auto-updating via a registry command.

Roger.

Roger Woods
Producer/Presenter/Engineer

Assuming that its not the obvious that Myriad in the studio that is left on (lets call it ST1) isn't actually using files from the one being switched off (ST2)



Does it do it if you just quit from myriad on ST2 or only if you fully shut down the PC?



We did have a case at a commercial station (even though they had a server) who had the same problem and it turned out one of their users was using ST1 to open files saved on ST2. Windows then kept a "shortcut" to that in their recent documents list on the Start menu and when it went to refresh the list it then stalled trying to check ST2 to see if the files were still available. This caused the whole machine to then stutter and pause.



Does ST1 have all the Myriad files stored on it or are they stored on another 'server' pc instead? If so what OS is that computer running - if it's Windows Server 2000/2003/2008 then you should be ok, if it's XP then it might be a problem with Name resolution going wrong when the ST2 machine is shut down.



Have a check in the Event Viewer in ST1 at the time that you have a stutter and see if there are ANY events logged - even informational ones.



Last thought is to try running Task Manager on ST1, switch to the Processes Tab and sort by CPU usage. Watch it as myriad stutters, you might see that an unexpected app suddenly hogs CPU usage.

------------
Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

Roger: Try watching performance monitor or Task Manager on the server as it happens, if the Network usage suddently shoots to 100% then that would explain it and might be due to profiles saving etc.



Also worth noting that usually you can't write more than about 300Mbit per sec to Sata2 drives so any higher than that would also stall the drives causing data reads to slow down.



If you are using Raid you need to reduce this further as it takes slightly longer to write to most RAID arrays then just a single disk.

------------
Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

Peter,



I hadn't thought about the server being the source of the temporary freeze!



As you've alluded to, our Myriad Audio Store (Dell PowerEdge Server) has a mirrored RAID using 2 1TB SATA drives.



(The Admin server is also a mirrored RAID but from IBM with 2 500Gb SATA drives, but this is not a mapped drive (UNC) to any of the Myriad PC, but it does manager user log-on/log-off via WInSBS2003.)



I'll have a look at the setting and see where that take me.



Thanks for the reposnse.



Roger.

Roger Woods
Producer/Presenter/Engineer

Hi,



We will still to be having issues causing myriad to stall on the automation and other studio machine whenever the other studio shutdown or reboots.



I know it is also happening at another radio station too.



This is with a server and we are now running a gigabit switch across the network. Peter - could you explain this issue with RAID discs on the server as to what I should be looking out for.



If anyone has any more ideas I would welcome them.



M

Matt Wade
Need Training or Consultancy for Broadcast Radio Software Products?
Get in touch
w: https://mattwadeonline.co.uk
e: training@mattwadeonline.co.uk