[angrycamel]

I am able to use cURL to see websites from the console but from within the XBMC gui none of the networking features work (weather, feeds, and SMB).

I have been posting over in the Zbox thread but since my problem seems to be pretty specific to me, I figured I would make a new thread for it. I really hope someone can help me figure this one out as it's driving me a little crazy

I've got XBMCFreak running off of a 4GB Patriot USB stick right now. I have everything working except for the wireless. At first my problem with connecting wireless appeared to be related to the signal strength of the internal wireless card so I installed a USB Wifi dongle. That is installed and configured now but I still am not connecting through XBMC. I am able to go to the console and ping any site with success. I even used cURL to pull down a couple URLs just to make sure everything was configured properly for the wireless dongle (I used wicd-curses to configure the connection) and it worked fine.

The problem comes when I switch back to the XBMC interface and it cannot see anything on the web or the local network. The log says cURL is returning a type 6 error (cannot resolve host) when trying to load the weather and feed urls.

Code:

23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1954156544    INFO: WEATHER: Downloading weather
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1954156544   DEBUG: SECTION:LoadDLL(libcurl-gnutls.so.4)
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1954029568   DEBUG: Loading: libcurl-gnutls.so.4
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1954029568   DEBUG: FileCurl::Open(0xb27be0ec) http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/USNY0996?cc=*&unit=m&dayf=4&prod=xoap&link=xoap&par=1004124588&key=079f24145f208494
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1953902592    INFO: easy_aquire - Created session to http://xoap.weather.com
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1953902592 WARNING: FillBuffer: curl failed with code 6
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1953902592   ERROR: CFileCurl::CReadState::Open, didn't get any data from stream.
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1953902592   DEBUG: FileCurl::Close(0xb27be0ec) http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/USNY0996?cc=*&unit=m&dayf=4&prod=xoap&link=xoap&par=1004124588&key=079f24145f208494
23:27:51 T:2994469744 M:1953902592   ERROR: WEATHER: Weather download failed!

A similar issue when I try to add an SMB source to the videos section

Code:

23:28:50 T:3079456640 M:1936887808   DEBUG: OnKey: 61453 pressed, action is Select
23:28:50 T:2994469744 M:1936887808   DEBUG: OpenDir - Using authentication url smb://
23:28:50 T:2994469744 M:1936887808   ERROR: SMBDirectory->GetDirectory: Unable to open directory : 'smb://'
                                            unix_err:'2' error : 'No such file or directory'
23:28:50 T:3079456640 M:1936887808    INFO: Loading skin file: DialogOK.xml
23:28:50 T:3079456640 M:1936887808   DEBUG: Load DialogOK.xml: 4.34ms

Oddly enough I cannot SSH into the machine (from Putty on my XP machine) either while it is connected via wireless. I can SSH to localhost through the console so it is running. Putty gives me a message saying "Network error: Connection timed out"

When I switch from wireless to a wired connection everything works fine.

Help! I am at my wits end with this thing!

Edit: Added wireless environment info
My router is a modem/router provided to me by Verizon for the FiOS internet service. I am connected using WPA2 security.





(This is a double post, since I posted in the wrong forum at first thinking this was a problem with my hardware. Can an admin please close the double post at http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=83446)

[angrycamel]

bump...

[angrycamel]

Bump

[prae5]

Do not bump multiple times in the same day, also this has nothing to do with xbmc. You will more likely get better support on ubuntu forums or better yet xbmcfreak's site as its their distro you are using.

Looking at the snipits you have posted above, first one isn't getting any data and the second one is trying to connect to smb:// but no server is listed - have you edited to log?

From the sounds of what you are describing you aren't getting an ip in the same range as your wired devices, or if your setting it statically you have done something wrong.

[angrycamel]

Thanks for the reply.

I am able to see the internet from the console by typing alt-ctl-f2 and using cURL to pull down a page. Is it possible that a problem at the OS level would behave this way? My thoughts were that since it is only a problem in XBMC that it is relavant here, please help me understand if that's not the case.

The log has not been edited but I did only post the relavent sections.

[prae5]

If you cant connect / ssh into the machine then you have a fundamental networking issue.

[angrycamel]

That's a fair point, I guess I wasn't considering that however it still doesn't explain cURL working. I guess you've made your point. I will take my issues elsewhere and hope someone will be kind enough to help.

[prae5]

Not necessary a case of taking it else where, just you will get better support there.

I still suggest you look check the ip's you are getting on both wired and wireless lans and do some basic network checking. Forget about xbmc at the moment, getting network setup correctly and everything else will sort itself.

[angrycamel]

Thanks Prae5. I really appreciate the help. I will check the differences between wired and wireless before starting over somewhere else.

[luger]

My issue isn't completely related but I'm curious if it's an Ubuntu problem that I need to address or an XBMC problem...

My box with XBMCLive is connected via ethernet. I am able to connect to the box via Putty or WinSCP so networking seems to be fine. However, when I try to actually do something network related (like downloading an add-on), the download fails and just stays stuck on "Downloading 0%".

I had started another thread about this but didn't get much response so sorry for posting again but I'm just curious about what direction I should go in... Is it an Ubuntu related problem or XBMC?

[speed32219]

I stopped trying to get both wired and wirless working at the same time. If I shut down (sudo ifdown eth0) then wireless would work and vice versa (sudo ifdown wlan0). I had setup a bash script to turn off and on my wireless.

[angrycamel]

@speed32219 - I'll give that a shot and see if it resolves my problem too. Thats a great suggestion, thanks.

@prae5 - As for the checking my network to see if there is any difference between the IP address dished out on wireless vs wired, there is none that I can see. All of the IP addresses are sequential. Here is the info taken from my router's "My Network" page showing all connected devices. (I have taken out the mac addresses)

This first part shows what the XBMC device looks like connected over the wire compared to everything else.

Code:

iPhone
Connection Type:    Wireless
IP Address:    192.168.1.2
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

Dell Office PC
Connection Type:    Ethernet
IP Address:    192.168.1.3
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

new-host-2 (XBMC Zbox)
Connection Type:    Ethernet
IP Address:    192.168.1.4
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

Work Laptop
Connection Type:    Wireless
IP Address:    192.168.1.5
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

Next I disconnected from the wired network and went into wicd-curses again and let it reconnect to the wireless. This is what I see in the router admin now.

The old wired lease isn't gone yet, but you can see the new one for the wireless connection added at the bottom. (I added the "(XBMC Zbox)" to help show which connection I'm referring to in the list)

Code:

iPhone
Connection Type:    Wireless
IP Address:    192.168.1.2
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

Dell Office PC
Connection Type:    Ethernet
IP Address:    192.168.1.3
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

new-host-2 (XBMC Zbox)
Connection Type:    Ethernet
IP Address:    192.168.1.4
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

Work Laptop
Connection Type:    Wireless
IP Address:    192.168.1.5
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

new-host (XBMC Zbox)
Connection Type:    Wireless
IP Address:    192.168.1.6
IP Address Allocation:    DHCP

[angrycamel]

I stopped trying to get both wired and wirless working at the same time. If I shut down (sudo ifdown eth0) then wireless would work and vice versa (sudo ifdown wlan0). I had setup a bash script to turn off and on my wireless.

A quick test gave promising results. I am waiting for a restart now to test again to be sure but I think you are really onto something!

[angrycamel]

Here are my test results.

First here is the log showing the connection failing when going into the weather as well as when I tried to add an SMB share under the music section.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=2JCDEEz3

In that same session I switched over to the console and deactivated the the eth0 interface with the ifdown command after switching from the XBMC gui to the console by typing ALT+CTRL+F2.

Code:

sudo ifdown eth0

As a side note, checking to see if the interface was up or down afterwards resulted in it reporting that it was still up.

Code:

ip link show eth0
2: eth0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000

After that, I switched back to the XBMC gui and tried again but the weather page still failed with the same message and adding an SMB source failed too. So at this point I restarted thinking that maybe the ifdown command would not take effect until after that.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=AHxCF8Yb

After the restart I was able to browse to the weather section without being presented an error. Dropping to the console again and checking the ethernet interface is showing that it's down now (and up at the same time oddly enough), but it changed from the last time I ran it. (Notice inside the aligator brackets that the result still says UP while the other part of the result shows DOWN)

Code:

ip link show eth0
2: eth0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state DOWN qlen 1000

Next I tried to add a new SMB share to the music section which failed with the familiar message but after a second try, it just locked everything up, requiring that I restart after dropping back to the console.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=PKFujHq2

Finally for the ultimate test. I went to the videos section and loaded up my Movies SMB share and played a movie. The buffering took a while (I attribute that to using wifi in general, which many warn is not a good experience), but it started to play the movie after about 30-45 seconds.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=xm8DftJm

SSH
After all of that, I still cannot SSH into the box while it is connected over WiFi. I am not that upset over it since I hope to set it and forget it once it's configured and I can do that either locally or temporarilly connect it wired in my office while I troubleshoot. It's still annoying and makes me feel like there is still a fundamental issue with this setup, but my main objective was to get access to the internet and my local media SMB shares and that has been accomplished so I can't complain. If anyone wants to chime in on this issue, please do.

Thanks!
Thanks for the help everyone and I hope that this detailed account will help others since this is far from intuative.

Thanks to Speed32219 for the most informative post!

[speed32219]

Can you ssh into the local box from the cli? sudo ssh user@localhost

You did run sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client? On all machines you want access to.

Cmd From ubuntu to ubuntu: (Note both machines need ssh installed)
ssh user@ip address
ex . ssh [email protected]

I access mine across the network using putty (and filezilla (ssh/ftp client) on my office xp machine and I have multiple putty sessions open currently to all machines when updating sw. Easy to use and setup.


note: you may aslo need to turn off for testing ufw and maybe even iptools if you still can't get to it accross the wifi network. (On the wifi pc)

PS .My home workstation is XP, but I have 4 xbmc boxes throughout the house on GB cat5e, one wireless running wpa2 running ubuntu karmic 9.1. ( I think I am also using wicd and when it boots eth0 is disabled and wlan0 enabled so it gets connected using a script) It also takes longer to start a movie 30-45 seconds due to the fact I have it accessing the gateway, then from the gateway to a wireless (Buffalo) bridge I have setup using dd-wrt to the server. All 802.11N by the way, but I can serve up SD content from the video server through 2 wireless networks as well as stream 480p from the web on it (720p to much buffering). Wirelsss just sucks at the moment, but a new standard has been put in place that is suppose to up the bandwidth to like 6-9 mbps.

Good luck.