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[duesy]

MC repeatedly crashes after importing apprx. 1/3 of my music library. Here's the configuration: 10K music files are stored on external HD, connected via USB 2.0 to server; clients are Dell laptops running MC 10 .146. LAN is a combination of wireless and wired clients (server is wired) to LinkSys Router. Two laptops connected in this way (one wireless, the other wired) experience similar MC failures when reaching an Import process of about 3,500 files. When importing same files to server via its direct connection to external HD (thus eliminating the LAN), all files come through fine. I reloaded MC 10 on all machines and even swapped from wired to wireless with the two laptop clients, but problem persists. Also, I directly attached external HD to one of the laptop clients and all files imported fine. MC and LAN don't seem to like each other? Please help, thank you.

[glynor]

I would check to see if it happens if you swap out the network card in the machine (or machines) that is crashing with a different (and hopefully better) one.  There are a LOT of crappy network cards (both wireless and wired) out there that can cause problems like this.

I've had trouble in the past with sustained network activity (and experienced problems similar to yours) with Netgear and Linksys cards for example.  Once I switched to a high quality 3Com card (I LOVE my 3Com cards) though, the issue went away (and my transfer rates and CPU usage rates fixed themselves too).  You also mentioned a Linksys router.  You could be killing the router with sustained traffic (do you have to reboot the router ever after this happens to get back online)?  Check out www.broadbandreports.com for more info on your router and to see if firmware updates have helped others (sometimes the updates make the problems with those things worse).  If it turns out to be router related, I'd check into smoothwall or monowall (google search them) before I buy a new one.  My smoothie was the other major way I solved my network problems.

A good way to see if it's a general network problem (rather than a software issue or a problem with the USB drive) is to try to slam the network/card with traffic.  An easy way to do this would be to download the bittorrent of a fedora linux release (fedora.redhat.com)  The bittorrents of those get going crazy fast on my cable modem (and were sufficent to lock up both my Linksys network cards and my old Netgear router within an hour when I was testing).

One other thing to test would be to see if the USB drive is crapping out on you.  Lots of manufacturers sell USB2.0 drives that really can't sustain USB2.0 speeds (check out reports at Tom's Hardware, HardOCP, Anandtech, etc).  Try doing the same size of import from an internal drive on the server system and see if it is any different.

Sorry about the book-length reply.  I've just been down that road myself though.  Hope this helps!

[glynor]

I forgot to mention.  I use MC with files served over a network (both from a high-quality firewire drive and from a RAID system in a PC) with no problems.  I know many others here do too.  Its not specific to MC, so it is probably specific to some piece (or the interaction of a few pieces) of your system.

[duesy]

Thank you very much for the lengthy (and welcome) reply. One of my laptops uses an SMC 2532W-B wireless card, which seems to be well regarded by other users. All other gear is LinkSys including router. I'll report back on progress implementing your suggestions. Thanks again.

[Alex B]

duesy,

I read between the lines, that you are not using Media Server to share your files, but instead you are importing files to a local MC Library from a network share. Correct?

I have a 10 Mbit Home PNA connection (uses a phoneline) from home to my office in another building. I had often trouble with the connection when I was trying to copy big files (several megabytes) to another location directly trough a network share.

Both locations share the same Internet connection and it is working OK. Also Media Center's Media Server is working well. So there is a better error connection for a "bad phoneline" in Internet oriented programs.

Now I use FTP server/client solution for file copy and it works OK.

Have you tried to copy files (big files, big amount, 100 MB or more) from PC to PC directly by Windows. Is it reliable and as fast as it should?

[duesy]

I am indeed using network share. When I import from MC, I navigate from My Network Places (running Win2K) until I locate the shared volume attached to Server. Click, Import, and away we go. This has worked well in the past, but now my collection is over 10K clips and MC will mysteriously shut down after importing about 3,500 songs. I am not familiar with "Media Server," is this part of MC? How would I implement? Thanks again.

[Alex B]

Yes it's a part of Media Center. You can stream your files from the server PC to the client PCs. The clients use the server's library, but are not able to make changes. Just look for Media Server in Help.

I was asking you to transfer large files from PC to PC, because then you might find if there are problems in your network.

[glynor]

In my experience (with my network troubles I pointed out above) sometimes your network can have little trouble transfering a single large file, but choke when needing to retrieve information about lots of files over a period of time, so I wouldn't rule out a network-related cause just because transferring a few large files over works sucessfully.

If the large files fail to transfer, its probably that you are experiencing a lot of packet loss or network collisions.  If this is the case, then cabling could be the cause (those Home PNA networks suffer from this a lot - especially if your home has older wiring).  Its also easy to test this out using a simple PING.  PING from one machine to another, and let it go for a while (ping -n <number of pings> <host>) and check to see if you have any packet loss or high times (they should all be <10ms).

[Alex B]

I think that because the transferred data is anyway splitted into small network packets it won't matter what the filesize is when testing the connection. It's important to generate long term heavy traffic when trying to find out if the connection is stable and if the same transfer speed is repeatable.

In my case the ping is OK. It's constant 3 ms (-n 500) when there is no other traffic. The cabling is not very old. But I think the cable length is at 10 MBit Home PNA specs' maximum. The maximum transfer speed I get is about 400 kilobytes/second instead of the about 1 megabyte/second what it should be in ideal conditions. The problems I had were that Windows sometimes lost connection to the network drive when transferring large amounts of data. The switched 100 Mbit LAN at both ends is working splendidly.

I am still quite happy with the situation. The alternatives were much more expensive.