FireFly Media Server › Firefly Media Server Forums › Firefly Media Server › General Discussion › iTunes loses connection after around 85 to 90 seconds › Reply To: iTunes loses connection after around 85 to 90 seconds
@peterius wrote:
First of all, this isn’t a firefly problem exclusively because iTunes DAAP server does this as well. It may have something to do with Bonjour.
iTunes just loses the library, usually during the first song played after around 85 to 90 seconds. There’s no error on iTunes, I’m using iTunes on a Mac OS X 10.3.9 with latest version of iTunes.
The DAAP server, whether I use firefly or iTunes is on a Windows XP box. Again, no error within iTunes.
However, firefly gives me some messages. First, if I change the song it gives “Write error: An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine.” I don’t think this is the problem, but its not great error handling for something that’s not an error, switching songs in the playlist.
Second, when it disconnects, firefly gives the error: Thread NN: could not read: Unknown error”
What’s particularly strange about this problem is that it seems like if iTunes on the mac streams from the windows machine past that first 90 seconds or so, then it will play for hours with no problems. But if I stop it and restart it, sometimes the problem occurs again. Both computers are on the same network and as far as I know there are no software firewalls on either machine.
The other thing that really annoys me is that I have to restart iTunes each time this happens. There’s no refresh or anything like that and I’m wondering whether this is because the dapp protocol doesn’t call for periodically advertising its presence or if there’s some secret way of getting iTunes to refresh its shared playlists list.
I think this error has occurred both while I’ve been running bittorrent on the windows machine and while I have not been, but its remotely possible that the large number of bittorrent sockets (although really I don’t think its large enough to cause problems) might be causing socket write errors that iTunes on the mac interprets as the host going down. But this is a really far fetched guess and it doesn’t explain why the connection is sometimes stable for hours even with bittorrent after its passed that initial 90 seconds or so, nor the fact that I’m reasonably sure I’ve run it without bittorrent and its still dropped.
Also, firefly is windows binary version 1696 and iTunes on the mac is 7.5(19) and I just checked and I don’t even have to listen to music. If I load the playlist, after 90 seconds or so, sometimes, firefly log reports that thread unknown error as above.
When iTunes thinks the daap server disappears, it closes down all the connections ungracefully, which is what the errors are.
As far as the disappearing itself, I’d suspect firewalls. Usually that’s when there is something blocking inbound or outbound to/from 224.0.0.251 on port 5353 udp.
If you have third party firewalls (or any, really), I’d try turning them off as a first attempt to solve the problem. If the machines are separated by a wireless router, see if the wireless router has an option on the admin page to enable IGMP or multicast.
Those are the likely suspects.
I think there is some writeup on that in the faq: http://wiki.fireflymediaserver.org/FAQ
— Ron