Serviio

Hello,

I tried to upgrade to Serviio 1.3.1 on xubuntu 12.04 desktop PC.

Serviio 1.2.1 (Free license) still works, but Serviio 1.3.1 does not show up in my UPnP browser (XBMC).
I connect over a link-local network (IPv4 addresses look like 169.254.x.y)

File serviio.log for 1.3.1 contains:



whereas the log for 1.2.1 (the one I can still connect to) finds a 169.254.* IP address :



Version details:



Can you help ?

169.254.X.X is a special IP address, it is normally automatically assigned by your PC after failing to get one from a DHCP server. This often happens straight after resuming from sleep, hence why Serviio now ignores them.

In your case you will need to use a proper IP address. Why are you using that in the first place? (It's not clear if you are doing it intentionally)

Another PC (machine A) is linked to the server PC (machine B) with an Ethernet cable.
This creates a so-called link-local network with 169.254.* addresses, no problem with that I think.

The problem is that serviio.log for the new 1.3.1 version complains along the lines of

and then announces 127.0.0.1 for a bound address, which is not very interesting.

whereas serviio 1.2.1 finds the link-local address of machine B;
machine A can still connect to B and play some music.

Yes because those addresses usually indicate that the machine hasn't had a chance to get a valid IP address yet when resuming from sleep, so they are now ignored so that Serviio can retry later.

Just assign 192.168.1.1 to the server and 192.168.1.2 or machine A, or similar.

Do you mean that serviio 1.3 changed in such a way that my setup needs to be changed, or is there some other way to go ?

You will need to change to a more standard setup, which shouldn't be a problem, just set a static IP on each machine.

Isn't setting a static IP incompatible with Avahi/Zeroconf services ? I use Avahi.

Why is it no longer possible to bind to a 169.254.* address ?
I tried to set the java property serviio.boundAddr, and to set the bound address on the serviio console, to no avail.

Can you give some more details about your setup, presumably one of the machines has a second NIC for Internet access?

As I've tried to explain, those IP are now blocked as they are usually always a symptom of a network problem, especially after resuming from sleep.

This is the only thing I do not like about Serviio so far

It feels arbitrary to me. Why not let users tell serviio to honor 169.254.* if it's what they want ?

I do not like to mess with networking settings, and I think that my setup has nothing fancy to it:
I only ever use Network Manager GUI, which has a 'link-local' button.

Machine A is a linux (ubuntu) PC, it connects to the internet with wifi (wlan).

Machine B with serviio is a linux (xubuntu 12.04 LTS) PC, with a similar setup (except it does not need to connect to the internet everyday).

An ethernet cable links A and B.
The link-local network connects automatically.
All is well with Avahi/Zeroconf.

It does not seem that difficult to define a new connection with static IP addresses,
but I'd rather keep my current setup which is more comfortable.

Lots of users were having problems with not being able to access Serviio after resuming from sleep. In a number of cases, Serviio was finding and binding to one of those temp IP addresses straight after resuming from sleep, because it started looking before the PC got a proper one from the DHCP server. The solution was to ignore those addresses, so that Serviio could retry and hopefully pick up a proper one once available.

So far you appear to be the only user that actually uses a 169.254.* address, so I guess call it an oversight, but it really is quite a niche setup. While there may be plenty of other users that connect a PC directly to their TV/HTPC, one would usually either set a static IP on each machine, or set a static IP on one and make it give the other an IP using DHCP. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any service that works with a link-local address that won't work with a proper IP address, so I really would recommend that you do it. I also belive there is no reason you cannot set it using the network manager UI, if you don't want to do it via a terminal.

Understood. Link-local connections go well with my physical setup but this setup is uncommon among serviio users, which does not come as a surprise.

And I tried to make the network between the two machines with static IP addresses: it turns out that it was not that hard;
XBMC is streaming music from serviio 1.3.1 as I type this message.
Thanks for all your comments.

Thats good, glad you got it working.