TomatoUSB

I have a dedicated fileserver on which I do not wish to install a dlna server. My silly TV, however, doesn't speak SMB or NFS, so I am attempting to use Tomato to act as a middle man.

The directory I'm attempting to share is all or nearly all video files, some in directories. Most of these video files are HD rips, so 2-10 GB each, although some are less than 1GB. Total size of the directory is about 1.4 TB.

The router is a WNR3500L with TomatoUSB v1.28.9054 MIPSR2-beta K26 USB Ext installed. WAN is bridged and DHCP server disabled. Wireless is enabled with WPA2/AES. CIFS client is enabled and the directory from my fileserver is mounted and visible at /cifs1/. I enabled Tomato's dlna server and shared /cifs1.

From my silly TV, I can see Tomato and browse the folders. At first there are only a few folders visible, and then more with time. I can even watch some of the video files in this directory. At this point it is reasonable to conclude that things are working as expected. Meanwhile, Tomato's media server page shows "scan in progress" or wods to that effect. The bandwidth graph shows Rx traffic up to 20 Mbps or so, and 'top' shows the mini-dlna process using all available CPU, with the cifs client also using some. It does appear that Tomato is building its database while pulling info off the fileserver.

Then, at some point, I would estimate roughly 15 minutes after enabling the dlna server in Tomato, Tomato's GUI stops responding. The browser never times out, just tries to load forever. Likewise, attempts to connect via ssh just hang forever. Tomato continues responding to pings for some time, but even that quits at some point if I don't power-cycle the router.

I have cleared the nvram and built the configuration by hand. I have tried saving the database to RAM, jffs, and finally to a blank 4GB USB stick freshly formatted ext3. In every case I can see the database slowly growing in size, but judging by its rate of growth, I would estimate it is less than 1MB in size with Tomato stops responding, so it can't be a storage problem. nvram usage before lockup is reported as "32.00 KB / 18.98 KB (59.30%)".

I don't know what to try next. I can recreate this problem 100% of the time. I'd like to know how to troubleshoot it or make some change to make it work. Or is there some insurmountable problem that prevents Tomato from sharing a cifs mount via dlna?

I power-cycled the router and used the 'watch' command to monitor a few processes. Here is the status at lock time:

Every 2s: uptime 2012-07-10 01:00:04

01:00:04 up 13 min, load average: 1.98, 1.86, 1.05

Every 2s: free 2012-07-10 01:00:04

total used free shared buffers
Mem: 61980 53464 8516 0 40
Swap: 0 0 0
Total: 61980 53464 8516

Every 2s: ls /mnt/sda1/.db/files.db -lah 2012-07-10 01:00:05

-rw-rr 1 root root 296.0K Jul 10 00:59 /mnt/sda1/.db/files.db

Every 2s: df -h 2012-07-10 01:00:06

(obviously this one got stuck)

top

Mem: 53592K used, 8388K free, 0K shrd, 40K buff, 13696K cached
CPU: 0% usr 21% sys 44% nic 0% idle 7% io 0% irq 25% sirq
Load average: 1.99 1.87 1.05 4/54 3301
PID PPID USER STAT VSZ %MEM %CPU COMMAND
732 729 root R N 34148 55% 61% minidlna -f /etc/minidlna.conf
611 2 root SW< 0 0% 12% [cifsd]
936 924 root R 1712 3% 1% top
841 548 root S 1208 2% 0% dropbear -p 22 -a
729 1 root S 5148 8% 0% minidlna -f /etc/minidlna.conf
734 733 root S 5148 8% 0% minidlna -f /etc/minidlna.conf
733 729 root S 5148 8% 0% minidlna -f /etc/minidlna.conf
642 625 root S 1724 3% 0% -sh
750 642 root S 1716 3% 0% watch ls /mnt/sda1/.db/files.db -lah
768 765 root S 1716 3% 0% -sh
924 915 root S 1716 3% 0% -sh
796 791 root S 1716 3% 0% -sh
846 841 root S 1716 3% 0% -sh
589 1 root S 1716 3% 0% crond -l 9
1034 1025 root S 1716 3% 0% -sh
888 846 root S 1712 3% 0% watch df -h
331 330 root S 1712 3% 0% /bin/sh
776 768 root S 1708 3% 0% watch uptime
806 796 root S 1708 3% 0% watch free
333 1 root S 1700 3% 0% syslogd -L -s 50
335 1 root S 1700 3% 0% klogd
600 1 root S 1340 2% 0% httpd
1 0 root S 1280 2% 0% /sbin/init noinitrd
726 1 root S 1272 2% 0% wldist
329 1 root S 1268 2% 0% buttons
330 1 root S 1236 2% 0% console
625 548 root S 1220 2% 0% dropbear -p 22 -a
1025 548 root S 1208 2% 0% dropbear -p 22 -a
791 548 root S 1208 2% 0% dropbear -p 22 -a
765 548 root S 1208 2% 0% dropbear -p 22 -a
915 548 root S 1208 2% 0% dropbear -p 22 -a
576 1 root S 1192 2% 0% nas
548 1 root S 1156 2% 0% dropbear -p 22 -a
575 1 nobody S 1036 2% 0% dnsmasq -c 1500 —log-async
601 1 root S 1028 2% 0% rstats
570 1 root S 1012 2% 0% eapd
288 1 root S 752 1% 0% hotplug2 —persistent —no-coldplug
88 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [mtdblockd]
43 2 root DW< 0 0% 0% [kswapd0]
413 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [usb-storage]
3 2 root SWN 0 0% 0% [ksoftirqd/0]
615 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [kjournald]
5 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [khelper]
2 0 root SW< 0 0% 0% [kthreadd]
609 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [cifsdnotifyd]
17 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [kblockd/0]
347 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [khubd]
4 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [events/0]
607 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [cifsoplockd]
44 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [aio/0]
41 2 root SW 0 0% 0% [pdflush]
42 2 root SW 0 0% 0% [pdflush]
412 2 root SW< 0 0% 0% [scsi_eh_0]
3294 589 root Z 0 0% 0% [sh]

Or is there some insurmountable problem that prevents Tomato from sharing a cifs mount via dlna?

You are trying to pull an 18-wheel trailer with a VW. It's just not going to work.

Do you have a swapfile set up? It probably won't help, but might be worth a try. Oh, wait. I see that you don't.

Even though free & top show free memory, it doesn't neccessarily mean that it is usable memory. There are a lot of shortcomings (tradeoffs) in the kernel internal memory management method. 64MB is just not a lot of RAM.

I bet that if you trimmed the size of your dlna shared directory down that it would work okay. That's no help, of course. You're just going to have to put a dlna server on youir fileserver machine.

Thanks for the feedback. I dug a little deeper yesterday and discovered that shibby's firmwares offer both mini-dlna and an nfs client, so I flashed up to shibby's 1.28.0000 MIPSR2-095 K26 USB Big-VPN and things are looking at least a little better. I have disabled cifs and mounted my media directory via nfs instead. With 19+ hrs uptime, mini-dlna still reports "Scan in progress", but no lock-ups. I have successfully streamed over an hour of 720p plus some 1080p to the tv without a hiccup.

The only problem now is that the scan process appears stalled with only a small fraction of the available video titles appearing in the tv menu. Looking at Tomato's bandwidth graph for the past 24 hours, it looks like it had five bursts of ~12 Mbps traffic in the first 6 hours of uptime, then nothing after that.

I will try adding a swap partition and see what that does. Thanks for your response.

A couple of interesting observations. I made a 512MB swap partition and used the autostart script to mount it, then restarted mini-dlna. After a few minutes I saw swap usage grow over 300 MB, then drop to 3008 KB. At this point I used 'watch' to keep a closer eye on it. Swap usage hovered right around 3004-3008 for a few minutes while br0 traffic continued in the 10-20 Mbps range.

Then suddenly swap usage started to climb again. Within two minutes it hit 497980 out of 500728 and then the 'watch' process stopped responding (I was using a 10s interval, so I assume the swap maxed out). The traffic graph also stopped updating at this point, but I was able to ping the router and open a second ssh session.

Then after less than a minute of no graph update and no refresh on 'watch free', my original ssh session was back at the shell prompt and the traffic graph was again updating, this time with no traffic passing. top showed 99-100% idle CPU, while the GUI reported that mini-dlna was still scanning. I assume the long pause was io-wait due to the swap purging from the mediocre USB stick.

I decided I needed a bigger swap patition, so I set about repartitioning the USB stick, when to my dismay I discovered that 500728 KB is the apparent max size of swap that will show up in Tomato from a single swap partition. No matter, I just divided my 4GB stick into 8 swap partitions of ~500MB each with a tenth tiny 500 KB partition at the end for the automount script. This appeared to work, and 'free' shows that my swap usage is now 532760/4004720 and growing.

I'm not sure I'm so keen on this whole dlna thing. I got this silly tv used from somebody that owed me some money, but if I were to buy new, I think I would just get something that supports nfs or smb, even if it means getting a separate media box (which I may do anyway, but not before I have some fun pushing Tomato around with it ;)

Let it scanned first before using it. You will need to do if you have added or deleted item on the database, so be patient.

@clarknova, using flash for swap is a really bad idea.

Success. Although I didn't watch it the whole time or record it, I saw swap usage peak and plateau at 1372836 (1.3GB) for a while before cycling again. Tomato's uptime is now 4:36 and mini-dlna finished its scan at some point in the last couple hours.

Thanks for suggesting swap. You were right on the money.

karog, I assume you are referring to the limited life span and write cycles of flash, and if so then I agree that's it's generally a bad idea. In this case though, it's more of a band-aid fix, as I'm probably just going to get myself a Roku or something similar. The flash drive I'm using is a cheapie I found in the drawer. I don't remember where it came from and I won't shed a tear if it dies tomorrow and hangs Tomato in the act. This was a learning experience for me and hopefully helpful to anybody in the future facing a similar problem.