Something is seriously wrong in lala land. Tablo 4 Tuner (Not Quad), up until last month, had been running pretty decently. Then it killed the 1TB drive. That was connected via powered USB 3 hub. Contacte T-Support, they were looking into it, may have been drive failing. Was also sent another power supply. Used power supply, threw on a 80GB portable, also powered through USB 3 powered hub. Guess what? That drive failed same way as first. Speaking of first, was able to recover it by (eventually) re-initializing as MBR, formatted as EXT4, put on Tablo, and away it went. Then that drive died, again. Same issue, reinitialized as MBR, formatted partition as EXT4, put it through 5 days of non-stop testing on my ubuntu box, no problems. Connected it to Tablo, dies within the hour. Found another drive, a 320GB SATA3 HP portable (WD drive). This time, connected it to Tablo raw, and let it format it. Wanna guess what happens? Yup! That drive dies, within 2 hours. No hub used this time, drive current is 380mA runing, 500mA startup.Within capabilities of USB port.
Had a hell of a time trying to get the damn thing to reset. Finally successful. Will be following up with T-Support come Monday.
On the upside, I had moved over to an APC Backups 1000va UPS. After DC supply testing went very well, decided that I really didn’t feel like building anything. Found the UPS at a garage sale, needed to new batteries (24v). I wasn’t going to buy them either, but instead wired together 2 Grp31 deep cycle trolling batteries and placed them on the floor under the desk. Given the storms that have been blowing Houston around, the system has worked out fantastic. 3 laptops, 2 montiors, Ink Slinger, Laser Shooter, several external hard drives, WRT3200ACM router, Linksys 3016 cable modem, and a TV did not even make a dent in normal usage from the battery/UPS. I guess from sheer capacity, the conversion losses just don’t make any difference.
The damn thing held onto its 192.168.1.235 IP addy despite factory reset, DHCP reserved in the router. Just what does one have to do to change the $^#&(!@ IP address? That is not even part of my DHCP range!
Got the guide downloaded, and app presented me with an interesting option…2.2.26 Update is ready for install! But wait, I had enabled commercial skip via Roku just yesterday morning. I think the root cause is beginning to emerge!
I wonder if I accidentally tripped some sort of backup firmware capability? Its a feature on Roku, at least on the UItra model. Perhaps that is why I had such a bitch of a time resetting it.
I had to have done so. Only thing that explains the 2.2.26 update when had already updated and enabled via Roku.
Once the reset was done, then app was able to properly connect and away it went. Errors on other firmware would explain a lot but no way to confirm.
I am at the point to send the darn thing in for service and let them do their quality / functional / diagnostic on the unit. Do much so I am prepared to deal with wrath of family for not having access to Manifest or This is us or whatever. After reset issues (and factory procedure did not work until the 15/15/15 typical universal router reset was done), damaged drives, keeping ip address, and so on… I have lost confidence. It was interesting to be able to playback a recording with “no storage connected” per status and error on other recordings, but an episode of MacGyver (original) did.
Are you keeping the drives separated from the Tablo and is the area well ventilated? If not, you could be cooking the drives.
The retention of the IP address has to do with your router and not the Tablo.
@Radojevic
Nope, not at all. Just drives that I had pulled from a laptop with the exception of the 1TB, it is a couple years old, purchased new. The other drives are probably 4 or 5 years. Reinitialized…Working great under windows and linux. It doesn’t make sense.
I think that I might have found a solution, or at least an interesting run of luck. 1TB drive was recovered…again…by initializing as MBR. Then let the Tablo format it. So far, has been up and running for a few days now. The other drives have been reinitialized and have tested just fine under both Linux and Windows environments.
It really is puzzling.
@bbaorbb
Tablo is just warm, drives are sitting off to the side, don’t even get a chance to really get warm at all before they die. The 1TB seems to be the longest lived drive, and hardly even gets warm during normal use, and pleasantly warm when siphoning with Tablo Ripper.
On the IP address issue, I have to disagree with your completely logical thought process, because I am seeing something on my end that is contrary. The router has been setup to provide an ip# 192.168.1.101 via “static lease” ). Router is a Linksys WRT3200ACM running OpenWRT 18.06-2. I have confirmed the static entry. I have backed up the configuration, and after extracting the .tar from the gz I then opened it with a txt editor. Guess what? The tablo should be using 192.168.1.101 yet the darn thing keeps camping out on 192.168.1.235. Even past a hardware reset.
I have been thinking about that as well. And I might have found a couple of “influencers”. The Roku boxes (Ultra and Premiere+) maybe talking to the tablo on 192.168.1.235 (previous IP#) causing it to retain.
Not sure how to approach that scenario for testing, other than yanking power cords on both boxes after removing the Tablo apps. Maybe I can just disconnect from tablo. I don’t know yet. Yank the power cord on the Tablo, wait a few minutes, plug back in and see what IP# the little ‘wonder’ is using. Will it be from router, or will it continue to campout on x.x.x.235?
Locate the file etc/ethers in the linux directory created by the software on your router. That file is a table of mac addresses in hex with the associated ip address on each line of the file. The file is updated with each connection attempt. Either edit out the offending address, or rename the file entirely (a replacement version with the updated table will be created automatically).
These files are used as a persistence log, with a rule set that utilizes or ignores the table based on the time stamp- primarily in the event of brief disconnects or power outages.
Very late response, been offline for a while during the move and electrical damage.
I did find the culprit, at least was able to reproduce it. My router has 2 operating systems, a current and redundant. I made sure to install OpenWrt onto both partitions, and both were then configured from same configuration file. So what was going wrong?
I had a bad transfer switch on the standby generator. When generator did its daily self test, xfer switch threw, causing very brief power disruption. Couple that with brief interruption from way old UPS that is severely overloaded, and router was switching to other partition with the other IP address. A bit hard to detect unless actually looking for it because the other address being used by Tablo was still valid. Took a while before I was able to correlate router logs, generator maintenance, ups alarm/event logs, and windoze event logs.
Now with both partitions setup correctly, all is well.
Fun Fact: with my USB drive is already powered by external battery, the load on the taboo is low enough it can tolerate up to just about 2.5 seconds of being unplugged from power before it resets when plugged back in. I suspect USB might be backfeeding power into it.