No Two Things at Once

[Daniel Taylor]

Lately there has been some discussion about not asking the B2 to do more than one thing at a time.  Also lately, I have made the mistake of doing just that with very unpleasant results.  Yesterday, after making a change on the HDD, I clicked on Scan Disk on the WebUI.  I had forgotten that the progress was displayed much further down the screen at the bottom, and when I didn't see anything being reported in the same box where the button is, I clicked on Scan Disk again before it had completed its job the first time.  What followed was about an hour where I could not communicate well with the B2 over WiFi, even though the signal strength is about -29 (very good), and NAS was a no-go as well, even though it has been working just fine for over a year.  I was afraid I was going to have to start in on the long list of chores such as resetting WiFi, and possibly even rebuilding the software on the SD card.  But after yet another power cycle, every thing started working again.  I still have no idea of exactly what happened, but I'm quite certain that what started the whole thing off was that I clicked Scan Disk again before it was finished.  I really wish the B2 had built-in safeguards to prevent a second job from trying to start when it's busy doing something else already.  But that is not the case.

So please save yourself a headache and only ask the B2 to do one thing at a time.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Daniel,

I'm in complete agreement with you on 'No two (or more) things at once'.

What was probably happening was the two 'Scan Disk' processes got into a 'fight' with each other, thus causing havoc internally in the B2.  When 'Scan Disk' runs, it rebuilds (re-writes) the 'b2db' file (this is the core critical file for the B2's music data management) and will be constantly writing the updates to this file while it is running.

Along comes another 'Scan Disk' process which then begins to over-write the 'b2db' file that the first process is still updating and writing. Each process is writing the data to the same file, but with different data.

I also agree with you that this process should run 'exclusively'; that would be best practice.

Regards,

Peter.

[PMB]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the feedback - I have forwarded your comments to Martin Brennan.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Daniel Taylor]

I was waiting for my computer to scan my B2 HDD as a NAS drive and I clicked on Scan Disk.  When the computer got to the end of its scan, it reported that it couldn't reach the B2. Just two more things that the B2 can't do at once.  You'd think I'd learn. ;o)