AS-202T crashing constantly

[Elrique64]

Version 2.4.0.RFU6 of the ADM on an AS202T

While doing file operations to/from the NAS, I have experienced repeated crashes on my AS-202T NAS. I have the following apps running on it:

Plex Media Server 0.9.11.17
Maraschino for Plex
PlexWatch v0.3.2 PlexWatchWeb v1.5.4.2
SickBeard 20140421
SABnbzdplus 20140701
CouchPotato 20140421 (Currently disabled in App Central)
Download Center 1.0.3.r795
ownCloud 8.0.2
phpMyAdmin 4.0.1
Shell in a Box 1.0.0.r15 (Currently disabled in App Central)

App Central apps that weren't listed prior to 4/15/2015
PHP-5.5 13.r3
Git 1.8.3.1r2
Mono 3.4.0.r3
Python 2.7.3r7
Geo IP DataBase 1.0.0.r7
VPN Server 1.0.0.r141 (Currently disabled in App Central)

Without fail, the only way to get this device back up and running is to do a power reset. Memory use is between 60% and 80% at the time of the crashes. These are happening about once per day, sometimes 2x per day. Log files show nothing as an error message that would force this activity or cause a system hang.

This is becoming almost unacceptable. These devices aren't supposed to require constant hands-on in order to verify operations.

Can we please get an Asustor rep to take a look at the causes for this? It is happening to several people and across multiple versions of ADM. We need to start seeing support people coming to the forums to start monitoring issues here as well. Many people aren't aware of the ticketing system and not having a presence on the forums is hurting Asustor's support structures.

I have since had further contact from Asustor. Will post that message in this thread, but new post.

[orion]

Sounds really bad. I did not encounter this issue on my as-304t (I have different applications installed). Did you send a ticket to asustor? How about their replies?

[Elrique64]

No, I haven't made a ticket for this in particular. I'm wanting to see how long it takes to get an official response. When this is a month old I'm going to make a ticket and start blasting them on it.

They make these forums available on the website and then no one ever comes here to offer support. Pretty piss poor customer service, IMO...

[John@AST]

No, I haven't made a ticket for this in particular. I'm wanting to see how long it takes to get an official response. When this is a month old I'm going to make a ticket and start blasting them on it.

They make these forums available on the website and then no one ever comes here to offer support. Pretty piss poor customer service, IMO...

Hello Elrique,

Greetings. We recommend you to send a support ticket to us, so we can investigate this issue seriously. Usually we need certain environmental information (or even private information) to analyze issues. It may not be proper to share those data here publicly. And it's usually more efficient to exchange information through our supporting system. Hope you are comfortable with this way. Thanks.

We hope this forum can be a place to share experiences each other. After all, there are many experts around the world that are more professional than us.

[Elrique64]

Ticket has been generated for my issue. There are at least 2 other threads here with the same issue. Has an employee visited those other threads, too?

Hello Elrique,

Greetings. We recommend you to send a support ticket to us, so we can investigate this issue seriously. Usually we need certain environmental information (or even private information) to analyze issues. It may not be proper to share those data here publicly. And it's usually more efficient to exchange information through our supporting system. Hope you are comfortable with this way. Thanks.

We hope this forum can be a place to share experiences each other. After all, there are many experts around the world that are more professional than us.

MORE PROFESSIONAL?!?!?! Your company is the one making the hardware! The lack of professionalism is shown through the lack of presence your employees have on these forums! The forums are linked from the main Asustor site, so this makes them officially sponsored, right? Non-employee technical support has been the NORM here. In fact, users have provide more support than the actual employees have.

Your company needs to get on the ball and start providing support the users expect on official forums. Leaving it to users like myself and others is unacceptable! And for what it's worth, I currently have 4 open tickets with Asustor now. Three of those are pending resolution, and one of them has been open since late February. You can about imagine my lack of confidence in the ticketing system with a track record like this.

[John@AST]

Ticket has been generated for my issue. There are at least 2 other threads here with the same issue. Has an employee visited those other threads, too?

MORE PROFESSIONAL?!?!?! Your company is the one making the hardware! The lack of professionalism is shown through the lack of presence your employees have on these forums! The forums are linked from the main Asustor site, so this makes them officially sponsored, right? Non-employee technical support has been the NORM here. In fact, users have provide more support than the actual employees have.

Your company needs to get on the ball and start providing support the users expect on official forums. Leaving it to users like myself and others is unacceptable! And for what it's worth, I currently have 4 open tickets with Asustor now. Three of those are pending resolution, and one of them has been open since late February. You can about imagine my lack of confidence in the ticketing system with a track record like this.

Thanks for your helps to report this issue to our supporting system.

I mean there are actually many 3rd parties that develop many applications on our NAS platform. Those developers, of course, are much more professional than us on their fields. Let's talk about kernel (one portion of our system), Linux is open source kernel which includes plenty of modules. Those modules control hardware / virtual devices closely. I believe no one / group can claim their professions on whole kernel. Great thanks to open source (many developers around the world).

Yes, we, of course, develop hardware. We know the details. However, we provide NAS solution to our customers. Hardware is just a portion of our solution. There are no excuses for us to fix problems that happen on our system.

We can actually manage / monitor all of issues on our supporting system. We know how many issues being still opened, closed or pended. Forum is almost impossible to achieve the management requirement. It's very easy to miss certain issues occasionally. That's why we recommend users to report issue to our support system. Thanks for those users sharing this information frequently in this forum.

I found there are 2 pending tickets from you (perl and crontab), right? Those are suggestions / feature requests. We are still discussing about it. Normally we'll treat bugs as higher priority action items. Hope you can understand.

One more thing: we want to express our thanks to you deeply. Thanks for your efforts on helping the other users in this forum. That makes this forum more healthy and prosperous.

[Elrique64]

I'm not going to derail this thread further with discussion about Asustor's responsibility to the users of their products. Instead I'm going to try to find a resolution to the systems that are locking up. Which app(s) are likely suspects and what we, as users can use to either replace them, or gather information so the developers of those apps can get the problems fixed.

This is the text of the ticket I originally posted regarding locked up systems on Asustor. It is ticket number 6068 in Asustor's tracking system:

Refer to the support forum message posted in this thread:

http://forum.asustor.com/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=5535

Other threads discussing the same issue:

http://forum.asustor.com/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=5419
http://forum.asustor.com/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=5326

I am not the only customer with this lock up problem. It took 9 days for a support person to come and comment on my thread. There has been NO official responses from an Asustor employee on the other 2 threads! This is UNACCEPTABLE!!!

Asustor needs to become more proactive on these forums. This is an officially supported forum and Asustor should have more of an active role in the discussions.

This ticketing structure remembers me, but doesn't remember my hardware! I shouldn't have to re-enter the same information each time I want to create a ticket. Once I have entered in the information once, the system should remember me and give me an option to add/change the info should I need to.

This is the reply I just received tonight:

Dear Mike,

Thanks for contacting us,

Running many services will cause the system run out of memory that may lead the NAS hang.
We noticed that you have installed Plex that will need to use lot of memory to operate.
Also, some apps that are not provided in our app central that may not be compatible with our system and cause the issue occur.
Since AS-202T only have 512MB memory, please remove the apps you don't need to use and try it again.
Additionally, if you are familiar with Linux, you can SSH into the NAS to clear the cache memory.

About how to SSH into the NAS, please refer to the link as below:
http://support.asustor.com/index.php?/D ... sustor-nas
Clear the caches memory:
sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

About forum and ticket system, I will forward your requirement to related team.

Thank you.

Please feel free to contact us, if you have any further questions or concern,

Regards,

Albert Xui

This is my reply:

I find it hard to believe Plex is the culprit here. I've been running Plex for almost the entire time I've had my AS-202T. (Installed the first time less than 2 weeks after original purchase, have used it since.) It has been just the last 2 updates to the ADM that have had issues with locking the NAS up.

If you look at the other threads in the forums that I pointed you to, I am the ONLY identified Plex User! Others are having the SAME issues. It seems the common denominator listed so far is the version of ADM and the fact we are all using Download Center.

I am asking those with issues in the other threads to post their applications in the thread I started in the hopes we can start to identify a culprit application instead of just pointing fingers without concrete evidence. I will take the steps to identify what the issue is. I hope that we will see an OFFICIAL Asustor developer in that thread to help identify the problems.

I have visited the other threads that have users in them reporting their systems are locking up. I've asked those users to report back to this thread with a list of the applications they are running, with the hopes we can start narrowing down the likely candidates for this problem.

If you are coming to these forums to report lock up issues, PLEASE include the following information:
Model of NAS:
ADM Version
Applications running and versions:
Average memory usage while operating (Activity Monitor, second tab from the left.)

What I also would like to see is the average memory AFTER shutting off each application, one app at a time, so you are going to turn it off, wait 5 minutes and average out the line from that point out. Turn the app back on.

This is going to take some proactive participation, and I hope everyone is willing to do it. I will append my first post, to reflect what I hope everyone can provide as I have the time to do it the day or so.

[Kapitein Haak]

Hello Elrique64,

If you want Asustor to move faster, see if you can make your NAS crash on a supported config. E.g. disable all packages except for the required one(s) (download manager?) and start a large download (two or three times?). If it failes/crashes then Asustor will have a clear startingpoint to troubleshoot a supported config.
If the NAS does work with the basic config, enable half of the remaining packages and start other large download(s). If it succeeds, add half of the remaining apps and test again. If it fails, remove half of the enabled packages and try again. Keep doing this until you have pinpointed the error. Depending on your download speed it might take quite some time however.

I hope you get this resolved soon!

Best regards,
Kapitein Haak

[Elrique64]

Download Center is one app that appears to have been mentioned by at least a couple of other users... I've noticed if I have more than about 100 jobs queued up the system is much more likely to crash than if under 100...

And Kapitein I'm sorry I omitted you in the other thread. You deserved to be there with Damien, Hobbes and Clinton Hall.

[Elrique64]

Received this from Albert this morning or late last night:

Dera Mike,

Thanks for the reply,

Plex is one of need to use lot memory services we known and found you installed.
There are many reasons will cause the NAS hang such as too huge and many files transfer at the same time, too many user access, too many and huge download task on the NAS...etc.
Too many process running on the NAS will cause CPU or memory can not afford it that lead the NAS hang.
For fixing the issue, we need to clarify which process, service or situation will cause it happen.

If possible, please provide the remote session to us for making the NAS record the log automatically so that after the issue occur we can refer to.
Or, you can do it by yourself, please kindly refer to the instruction as below to implement a script to log the log message every 10 minutes.
1. Please login as root with admin password via SSH
2. Download the attachment
3. Put the "dmesg.sh" under /Public/dmesg directory, if you do not have dmesg folder please create a new one.
4. In the terminal, run "crontab –e"
5. Add a line "*/10 * * * * /bin/sh /volume1/Public/dmesg/dmesg.sh"
6. Save and quit

When the issue has occurred again, please send the log which in that particular time to us.

Thank you for your cooperation and hope we can find the root cause soon.



Please feel free to contact us, if you have any further questions or concern,

Regards,

Albert Xui

Included with this text was a dmseg.sh file that contained the following:

Code: Select all

[size=85]#!/bin/bash
# Program:
# capture dmesg
# History:
# 2013/10/30 Elsa Lau v1.1
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin
export PATH

date=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M)
filename=log_${date}.log

/bin/dmesg >> /volume1/Public/dmesg/$filename.log[/size]

This would NOT run as is. The first line needed to be edited to reflect the BusyBox environment using ash instead of bash. It should read:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/ash

This does in fact make a log file when executed from a Terminal session. I will check these log files throughout the day to see what, if anything they might report.

EDIT: This creates a NEW file every 10 minutes. This could fill a directory fairly quickly and a HDD over a period of time, so this isn't something that can be turned on and left for posterity.