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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Also

A complete power cycle of everything on the network is not a bad idea, but if there is a lot of equipment it can be a PITA. I used to get a lot of unintended power cycling, courtesy of the power company, ice storms and drunk drivers, but less so after installing a good UPS system.

If the problem is due to the network there can be various things going on "underneath the sheets". If a problem persists it is usually the result of some obsolete information being stored in a network device or network software somewhere in your network. Rebooting or power cycling may not even be enough in some cases, e.g. where there are unexpired DHCP leases for IP addresses. This use to be a big problem some years ago, but I believe that newer software handles these problems more gracefully than before.

All the nodes on my network rely on a DHCP server in my router. To avoid time out problems with the leases I have found out the MAC addresses of each of my devices and I have given these devices names and fixed IP addresses, as stored in the router memory. This way, there are no out of date IP addresses to confuse things. LAN switches also cache MAC addresses to route data efficiently on the LAN. This can make things go dead when devices are moved, but this is cleared by power cycling as these devices don't normally have stable storage, except for a few parameters if they are managed.

Unfortunately, it is still common for two communicating machines to get out of synchronization when one of them is restarted but not the other. There is no need for this, just poor quality software. (The methods to deal with these cases correctly were well understood by at least the easily 1970's by people doing state of the art computer networking protocol design.)

All this equipment is supposed to be "plug and play" but that is a promise that is not always delivered.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: Also - Tony Lauck 02/18/1511:35:38 02/18/15 (0)

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