Continuous Freezing Issues with KiwiSDR via Proxy: Troubleshooting Tips
Hello everyone, I manage a KiwiSDR from central Italy via proxy http://iz6198swl.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/ . Recently, however, it freezes after a few minutes (the page remains frozen) and this happens continuously, forcing me to refresh the page. I have tried modifying the settings in the Network tab, assigning a static IP. I set the "Ethernet interface MTU" to 1440 since I am using a 4G SIM connection. I also reduced the "Number of audio campers per channel" to 2. The connection has about 30 Mbps download and 18 Mbps upload. What could this be caused by? Thanks everyone.
Comments
I'm not using a proxy but I intermittently have a similar issue when connected via my local LAN. If I connect from a remote site it is less likely to freeze (can run for several hours on a remote connection before I see it freeze but locally it may happen in a few minutes)
I monitor FT8 mostly and I have found that using the mute button makes it happen more often. Turning the volume to zero or very low seems better.
(My Kiwi is off air currently, waiting for me to deal to a very noisy fan - Does anyone know a suitable plugin replacement for the fan please :-) ? )
Today, I tried changing the router to see if the issue was related to it, but it keeps disconnecting. Basically, the KiwiSDR closes the connection. I noticed that this happens after about 20 minutes. I am using Chrome as my browser.
Hello everyone. we run 2 kiwi's via the (.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/) we have also the problen that the two kiwi's freez and then we have to reconnect. t is getting wors
anyone knows howe to fix this probelem.
thanks
@swcholland What kind of Internet connection are you using? Is it also a mobile (3G/4G) connection like the original poster of this thread?
I've had the same issue with my KiwiSDR2 randomly freezing for all users at once. I at first thought it was my Kiwi's connection, but recently was on another KiwiSDR2 150 miles away from mine, and his froze while I was on it. When his froze, I IMMEDIATELY went over to my Kiwi's address, and got a "not found" message on mine, like the proxy address didn't work. 5 seconds later, I reloaded mine again and it was fine.
There was a discussion on a morning HF net with users of both of these Kiwis, and others have been seeing this too. Given it's happening on 2 at the same time, 150 miles apart, I'm assuming something else is up then, and it's not my internet connection. (And sounds like the same issue as @swcholland. ) I do think it is getting more common/worse on mine, too. Not positive on that, though.
I'm using a fiber internet connection these days, with Wifi to my Kiwi.
The one 150 miles away, I THINK he's on a cable internet connection, and direct ethernet to his router there.
My Kiwi: http://21040.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/
The one 150 miles away: http://22303.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/
-Nate
N8BTR
If these are all proxy connections then I suppose it's possible that the proxy service is now at the breaking point. Although the 5 minute cpu utilization is only about 50% and the network is only roughly 20 Mbit/s.
I'd be interested to know if this problem persists if the connections are moved off the proxy service.
I think I found a proxy-related problem. More info soon..
Hi, since I’m using a SIM-based connection, I decided to change my modem (this is the third one I’ve changed) and installed a more recent model. Now it doesn’t freeze as often, but it still crashes after about an hour, whereas before it would stop every 15-20 minutes.
I also thought that the issue might be the proxy, which, combined with the SIM, could be causing these crashes.
Another thing I’ve noticed is the very high latency. Comparing my KiwiSDR to others, I have almost a 2-second delay! Can you confirm if this delay is mainly caused by the proxy?
Thanks!
You can have the best linear power supply in the world and still have Beagle reboots because the power cable has too much IR^2 loss causing momentary voltage brownout when the Beagle has a fast current spike. Either too small a wire gauge (smaller than 20 AWG / 0.8 mm) or too long a length (> 12-18 inches/ 0.3-0.5 m). This is the #1 customer install problem.
Do this in the admin console tab:
msl | tail -n 2500 | gr delaying
The msl will take a long time to run. If you see a bunch of "power on detected" messages then your power supply or cable is no good.
Feb 16 23:25:26 kiwisdr kiwid: 00:00:01.542 power on detected: delaying start 30 secs...
Feb 16 23:30:13 kiwisdr kiwid: 00:00:01.325 power on detected: delaying start 30 secs...
Feb 16 23:39:40 kiwisdr kiwid: 00:00:01.662 power on detected: delaying start 30 secs...
Feb 17 14:49:10 kiwisdr kiwid: 00:00:01.098 power on detected: delaying start 30 secs...
The Beagle will power off the microsecond the voltage it sees hits about 4.75V to protect the system against things like bad writes to the eMMC filesystem. An under-voltage "crowbar" as we old timers used to call it.
The proxy-related problem I mentioned earlier causes a proxy client restart when you click on the "click to (re)register" button on the admin connect tab for versions earlier than v1.803. So that wouldn't directly explain what's being seen here.
I should also mention in connection with the voltage drop post above. I knew about the problem many years ago. One day I made up some short cables out of some random "speaker wire" I had where it wasn't immediately obvious what the wire gauge was. I was astonished when the brownout problem happened when running the admin sd card backup function! (it is known that sd card writes take a lot of additional current).
I didn't believe it until I put a scope on the power connector at the Kiwi set to trigger at lower than 4.8V... And it triggered! lol
I measured the wire gauge and it was 24 AWG or something. I used one of those online voltage drop calculators and it pretty much confirmed the problem for the length of wire I was using (given a guess at the current spike amount -- with some effort I could have measured that too).
John
I get the same problem
it doesn't matter whether i'm @ work remote or here in Masterton at home. I have a wideband microwave link to here and other services are not affected @ work we have a very solid fibre link to the outside world
but you can bet that the remote goes off line with FTP server not found around 7 am every morning.
I also see when it reboots that all the remote users have dissappeared so it is thr FTP server!!!
So the latest news is that the proxy server on kiwisdr.com is actually crashing fairly frequently. From once every couple of hours to multiple times per hour.
The proxy is written in the Go programming language which I am not that familiar with. Especially not in debugging. So this will probably take me a while to sort out.
Would it be beneficial to encourage owners to get their Kiwis configured on their own network to reduce the load on the proxy server?
I'm sure there's many Kiwis on networks that could be easily configured for port-forwarding that really don't need to be on the proxy server. Since the KiwiSDR 2 works out of the box on the proxy service, I'm sure many don't explore the option of hosting it on their own network.
You could add a message at the top of the Connect page with a link to the instructions for configuring the Kiwi on their own network, stating benefits such as a faster waterfall, less reliance on the proxy server connection...
I know there's many Kiwis on ISPs and networks that don't support port-forwarding that really have no other easy option but to use the reverse proxy service.
This would be an alternative for people who could configure a private reverse proxy.
At this point I have a question - what would be the configuration for an Apache2 reverse proxy?
Unfortunately I have not yet managed to configure this on my Apache2.
I have tested two variants, but both lead to the following error message.
Variant 1:
<Location /kiwi/>
ProxyPass http://192.168.x.y:8073/
ProxyPassReverse http://192.168.x.y:8073/
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:CONNECTION} Upgrade$ [NC]
</Location>
Variant2:
ProxyPass /kiwi/ http://192.168.x.y:8073/
ProxyPassReverse /kiwi/ http://192.168.x.y:8073/
Error message:
What is missing here or what should I configure differently?
Regards, Steffen
@jimjackii That particular error, where you get
vundefined.undefinedonly occurs when your proxy setup if failing to correctly handle an XHR transaction for a file called "VER" the browser is trying to get from the Kiwi server. That file will contain a JSON response that looks something like:{"maj":1,"min":804,"ts":4611686018441628445,"sp":1}So open the Javascript console and network tab in your browser and see why the fetch of the VER file fails. Does it get an HTTP status of something other than 200? Is the response something other than like the above? If so, figure out why.
Also, on the admin webpage tab, toward the bottom of the page, change the "Web server caching?" setting to "No" and restart. Your Kiwi page loads will be much slower, because no web caching will be done, but it may overcome whatever shortcoming your proxy solution has.
Here was someone else with an nginx proxy configuration that caused problems with the VER file fetches: https://forum.kiwisdr.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/19796#Comment_19796
The VAR query enters a
$AJAX BAD STATUS=404 url=/VER
back. I'll have to have a closer look, my knowledge of JavaScript etc. is not too good.
Webserver caching is always OFF.
Thanks also for the reference to the other forum thread.
Regards, Steffen
You should be able to fetch this file from any Kiwi, using any browser, even using the Kiwi proxy. E.g. http://jks.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/VER