PINK remote reset circuit.

Dgswaner

My Pink occasionally locks up when I try to FTP. I'm at work and would love to reset it but I'm 30 miles away. I have a stamp attached to the PINK my thought was to monitor a variable if it = 999 then it triggers a relay that cuts power to the Pink and the stamp. This would reset the variable in the process of reseting the stamp. I was thinking of have a capacitor big enough to hold the relay open for a second or two. Is this a good idea? is there a better way with out getting anything to complicated, space and power is limited. is a relay to noisy for a PINK, and there for not advised?

thanks for your input.

.... the relay would power the PINK through the NC position of the relay.

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A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer. - Jamie Hyneman, Myth Buster

Chris Savage

I have not been able to duplicate this issue. Can you list what exactly the PINK is doing besides FTP at the time it appears to lock up and what version of the firmware you’re using? Take care.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support

Dgswaner

I should clarify... the PINK doesn't lock up. just the FTP part of it. I'll be uploading files just fine and then my connections will time out. I've waited, restarted programs and used different computers the only way to get it working again is to power cycle the pink. but while I'm unable to FTP I can still browse the pink and modify vars.

I actually have several issues with FTPing, but they are all minor and I've found work arounds. With this specific issue I can't make it happen, it's kinda happening randomly. But when it does happen I'm usually uploading and editing pages a lot. I also have my stamp continuously reading Var25 for my bot control. and I have at least one page accessing the PINK. reading and writing vars. here is my IP address if you want to look at what I'm doing 71.219.82.181.

I'm on version 1.0

I'm going to be working on the stamp code so it not constantly communicating with the PINK.

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A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer. - Jamie Hyneman, Myth Buster

Chris Savage

Do you have a PINK Module with V1.1 firmware? If so does it exhibit the same issues?

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support

Dgswaner

I only have the one PINK.

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A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer. - Jamie Hyneman, Myth Buster

Chris Savage

Okay, just trying to narrow down the scope of the issue if possible. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar/same issue?

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support

Dgswaner

ok it just happened. I haven't FTPed anything for over an hour. I browsed the site for errors. I was about to upload the revised pages and no go.
I have a error 120 server busy error. I'll PM you my login. perhaps the diagnostics info will be of some value. I have all the pages backed up. so no worries.

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A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer. - Jamie Hyneman, Myth Buster

Harrison.

My guess is that the PINK firmware only allows for two or three open tcp sockets for ftp. This is fine for small lans where you are guaranteed to be the only one trying to ftp to the PINK. Exposing your PINK's ftp port to the internet makes this problem even worse since a normal IP gets scanned many times a minute for ftp password holes and such. These connections could cause the issues you are seeing here.

FTP is an interesting protocol. It uses one dedicated socket for a control data and one or more sockets for file transfers. This enables client/server communication while there are active transfers. Enabling more than one connection at a time is very expensive in terms of cpu cycles/ram since you have to keep track of connection states. Not to mention the file system on the PINK is probably limited thus it would be difficult to implement multiple read/write handles anyways.

Just as a test: Try opening multiple ftp connections to your PINK using different applications (wsftp, windows explorer, etc). See if you can reproduce the errors by creating too many simultaneous connections.

Harrison

Dgswaner

well I found the limit. 5 users. at least per user name. I had 3 sessions of wsftp open, ftping with IE and dreamweaver. I tried to keep it as busy as I could... and did for a few minutes. it held up great. I think just all the right things need to happen in the right order. a problem you can't reproduce is very difficult to resolve.

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A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer. - Jamie Hyneman, Myth Buster

Chris Savage

Hello,

Remember that while the FTP is a busy process the PINK still has the web server, e-mail engine, and one of the most time consuming processes which is serial communication with the host. On a normal web server this wouldn’t be an issue but with a PINK it’s real effectiveness comes by having constant communication with the host controller. I would also try your tests while it is not busy handling that as well. Admittedly the PINK testing was mostly done under controlled circumstances and subject to very low overhead. However the routines used are part of the standard development libraries used by NetBurner. If there’s a problem it most likely exists in more than one place. Still, we could see about getting your firmware upgraded to see if that helps. Take care.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support