[drats_users] Picture crash

[Arnold Harding]

I discovered a couple more things after I sent the email.  Rather than 
searching for my comments, I'll just put them here.
I probably do have a fairly marginal path to the repeater (K6LRG). 
However, it works great on voice (yes I know data is different).  With 
an HT outside where I have reasonable line of sight, I can talk on the 
repeater on 440.  I have an outside antenna on the house, and it's in 
the clear so it should "see" whatever without any other obstructions. 
The main computer -M is using an ID-1 at 10 watts, and 1 watt works 
clearly on voice.  The laptop -L is running into a 2820 running 17 
watts on 440, and 5 watts usually works fine (see HT above).  Normally 
the ID-1 is only voice and the 2820 is for everything including 
playing with D-RATS, but I need 2 radios for this.

The ID-1 uses a USB cable, and the USB comm port device is in the 
ID-1.  After I sent the email, I noticed that the ID-1 wouldn't 
communicate with D-RATS, and D-RATS wouldn't send.  I exited, and 
tried the ID-1 program, which also wouldn't talk to the ID-1.  So I 
restarted the computer, and everything is back to normal.  The port 
crash may have been at the point where blocks 13, 14, 15 & 16 failed. 
I did not see any failed blocks message next to the % indicator before 
that.  I did see the failed blocks yesterday, so it may have worked 
perfectly to that point???

I like testing stuff, and marginal testing seems to be my specialty. 
The group of us have had fairly good success sending files through the 
repeater, but again, retries might fix it.  I'll gladly do more 
testing, but it's a nice day and I have many other projects waiting 
for me.

Arnold

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Smith" <dsmith at danplanet.com>
To: "Discussion of D-RATS" <drats_users at lists.danplanet.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2009 10:05 AM
Subject: Re: [drats_users] Picture crash


>> OK, here's the logs.  I don't really have a clue what happened, it
>> just seemed to be unhappy and stop.  I didn't change any
>> configuration during the transfer, but I did go between the Chat 
>> and
>> Event Log windows.
>
> Okay, I think this clears things up a bit.  If you'll humor me, I'd
> like to explain a few things from your receiving debug log as they
> pertain to what's going on here.
>
>> Acking block 13
>> Acking block 14
>> Acking block 15
>> Acking block 16
>
> This bit shows us that you're definitely on the fringe and you're 
> not
> getting all your blocks through cleanly the first time.  There's no
> problem with that of course, just a data point.
>
>> [SESSION 4]: Receiving [42%] 73.34 B/s (Total 2 B)
>> Acking blocks [13, 14, 15, 16] ({'': '\r\x0e\x0f\x10'})
>> [SESSION 4]: Receiving [45%] 78.58 B/s (Total 2 B)
>
> This should have an "X retries" message in it but it doesn't, so I 
> need
> to fix that so that you can see it from the UI.
>
>> Session timed out!
>> SESSION IS CLOSED
>
> Here, I believe, lies the problem you're seeing.
>
> Unrelated (directly) to retries, there is a timer that causes it to
> give up if a particular block takes too long to get through.  This 
> is
> fragile, because it can depend heavily on how much delay there is on
> the line (lots, with a repeater) and the number of blocks that came
> before it that had to be resent.
>
> So, I think what's happening is that you're sending a pretty
> good-sized file through a high-latency link and missing a fair 
> number
> of blocks along the way, which causes it to take a long time (which
> should be fine).  Thus, towards the end, the block timers are 
> getting
> impatient and it fails too early.
>
> I need to make some tweaks to this logic, obviously, which I'll do 
> for
> the next version.  If you can repeat this test a couple of times 
> after
> that, we can re-examine where we are.  Sound good?
>
> Thanks for your patience!
>
> -- 
> Dan Smith
> dsmith#danplanet.com, s/#/@/
> www.danplanet.com
> KK7DS
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