WD TV LIVE Problem with ReadyNAS DUO

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
21

A couple of things:

Enabling flow control does NOTHING if the switch the device is plugged into doesn’t support flow control.   It’s a waste of time and added complexity to enable it if your switch doesn’t do flow control.   

It’s been a long time since I did “sniffs” of network traffic on the older generations of WD, but I do know that the newer WDs use VERY large TCP “frame” sizes --64Kbyte.

If your switch doesn’t have large buffers (big enough to buffer 64 Kbyte frames), it can cause packet loss and retransmissions that can ultimately cause the connection to break down.

The only way to see if this is happening is to have CLI access to the NAS and look at the TCP statistics and see what the error / retransmission count looks like.

Here’s what it looks like on my MyBookLive:

MyBookLive:~# netstat -s
[SNIP]
Tcp:
    210228 active connections openings
    2487 passive connection openings
    5 failed connection attempts
    87 connection resets received
    1 connections established
    1062207 segments received
    1204840 segments send out
    45 segments retransmited
    0 bad segments received.
    531 resets sent
[SNIP]

 note the 45 segments retransmitted…  that’s a comfortably low number.

Before I upgraded my switches, when I tried to watch any streaming video higher than about 15 megabits per second, the retransmit count skyrocketed.

22

I called Lvl 2 and explained problem and what we did and nothing.  All they  offered was to buy it back from me and refund my money.  I was truly expecting  a level of knowledge and skill on the product to help diagnose the problem but that was not the case. Oh and this was the 3rd device, they sent me another new one.  So there is something wrong in the device or my setup and have not been able to close on it.