# nyone else observe this?



## Bob Haller (Mar 24, 2002)

I have 2 508s sitting side by side I reboot them weekly for dependable operation. They are both plugged into the same UPS, which I turn off momentarily to reboot. 

One comes back fast the other hangs on acquiring sat please wait. The hang time for number 2 is twice or 3 thimes that of number one. 

Scott its not a problem but I am curious as to why this occurs. I used to think it might be my SW64 but the upgrade to dishpro elminated that possiblity. I swapped sat cables no difference. Last time I checked they both had the same software.

Maybe the parts oin one are slightly better than the other? I just wondered if anyone else had noticed this?


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## boba (May 23, 2003)

Bob how full is the hard drive on the slow 508?


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## Bob Haller (Mar 24, 2002)

Both less than 10 hours and nearly equal. I know different models have varying boot times but the same model?

Like I said its not a problem but I am curious.


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## Peluso (Sep 11, 2002)

could be something as simple and as hard to find as a partial solder on the board.


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## Jacob S (Apr 14, 2002)

This is pretty interesting. I wonder if the one with more reboots would end up having a problem later if it is an early sign of something to come. I remember when Dish had me to go a system dump screen on a 2700 to see a particular number in which indicated how many resets the receiver had done and this told them if the receiver was having unusual problems or not. I wonder if there is any way of doing such things with the newer receivers and anything special to that effect to the DVR's.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Is it always the same box or does it seem random. If it is always the same box try turing that box on first and then the one that does not exhibit the problem a second later. See if it depends on who goes first or see if you can narrow it down to box related. Maybe it has to do with both boxes accessing the switch at the same time?


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## Bob Haller (Mar 24, 2002)

Good idea I will time each box seperately. They acted the same on the SW64 as the dishpro switch they are on now.

Having fixed machines for a lifetime no two are EXACTLY the same. My old saying it one of those machines. I will put a piece of tape on it to see if it goes south.

I can also put the slow boot on a legacy twin feed I kept after the upgrade. When we had the fire victims with us I had to add a extra dish its now unused. I hope to use that spot for D dish but line of site is going to be close thanks to trees, I really like the dish on the deck. My service a snap espically when snow sticks to the pan


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## AllieVi (Apr 10, 2002)

Bob Haller said:


> I have 2 508s sitting side by side I reboot them weekly for dependable operation. They are both plugged into the same UPS, which I turn off momentarily to reboot.


Just curious - why would you choose to reboot them using this technique? If the receivers happen to be writing to their disks at the time (let's say to the area where file structure is kept), you run the risk of causing rather than preventing failures. Do you reboot your computer this way?

Instead, why don't you turn the units off and wait until their hard disks stop before turning off the power to the UPS?


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## Bob Haller (Mar 24, 2002)

Well before I got UPS, the receivers would reboot this way at least once daily. I figured they are designed to tolerate this.

They actually ran better that way but the reboot delays if we were watching tv or recording were troublesome.

But UPS prevents a regular reboot. I even thought about automating it with a timer at 4am..

If my weekly reboot is doing harm what about thunderstorm season?


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Why do you have to turn of the UPS momentarily? The purpose of a UPS is to not interrupt power? You might want to find out why you need to turn off the UPS. As someone suggest, randomely turning on and off the boxes is not the best thing for them. I am sure they are designed to recover from these types of failures, but way rock the boat. This is what you call an edge condition and to assure the highest possible success rate, removing as much edge conditions as possible is a good thing. 

As for my suggested test:
If you get the behavior both directions my guess is that what is required to aquire a signal is serialized. Don't have any knowledge in that area but if they both behave when doing my suggest test then that would be one explanation and I would say that is as designed. If it is only one box then I would think it is a box related issue. I would do the test a few times to verify your results. 

Guess the main point I would make, if you have to turn off your UPS from time to time there is something wrong with your UPS. As for the 508s, I have been told that it is good to turn them off at least once a week to get updates and programming info. You should not have to power reset them if you do, Dish has a serious bug that needs to be fixed. And I know that Dish has bugs!! all software has bugs.


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## Filip1 (Sep 3, 2002)

Hi Bob, I'm curious why you don't use the front panel (power button) reset??
I do this on mine fairly often and i believe they work better for it.


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## Guest (Sep 4, 2003)

Bob,
I have been silently watching these forums for the past 6 months and seeing you complain of the many issues. I often wondered how you use these things to always have such bad results. 
You often post of rebooting weekly for stability. Now reading this thread I have to wonder if you ever turn off your receivers. I think if you turned them off when not in use there is no need to reboot them. Since the last upgrade, they are set to automatically reboot each night on their own, but only if they are turned off. I'm in Sacramento and mine reboot at about 12:30AM (PST) each night. At least this way the receivers are getting a good clean reboot. Simply cutting power to a running computer is not the best way to reboot them. Just because a machine can cope with the occasional power outage, I see no reason to stress them through this regular ritual that shouldn't be necessary at all since the last update.
I have a 501 and 2 508's. I bought the 501 on day 1, and all 3 boxes have worked as designed. I wish for a few more features, but the boxes all do what they should for the past couple of software versions. My boxes get a heavy workout each day with many shows being recorded and time-shifted, but I do turn them off when not in use.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

tbenning, 

If the 508 actually reboots when turned off during the night shows that there is some type of memory leak that they cannot find or some type of stability problem introduced by runtime. The fact that they added this as a feature is proof to me that there is a stability issue they can't find. 

IMHO I don't consider this a feature, I consider this a hack and very scary to hear. When NT was not stable, the IT people where rebooting them each night and considering this as a solution to the problem. When asked they would say NT boxes are solid but would not mention the nightly reboots. As a point of reference, my Linux box at work is up 24 days and I had to bring it down 24 days ago for a memory upgrade.  So the fact that the box has to be rebooted every night and they made this a feature makes my skin crawl. (For reference I am a software Engineer). 

I not saying that Bob is or is not using the boxes as intended. I don't have enough info to make that determination. However, if what you say is right tbenning then Dish has something wrong on the 508 that needs fixing and a reboot is not the answer. The fact that I was told that the procedure is that the 508 should be turned off once a week to assure updates and download program guide info is bad enough. Now they are rebooting the boxes every night. UGH!


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## Peluso (Sep 11, 2002)

tbenning said:


> Bob,
> I have been silently watching these forums for the past 6 months and seeing you complain of the many issues. I often wondered how you use these things to always have such bad results.


First off welcome to forum, or at least welcome to being an active member of this forum.

Secondly, there has been lots of discussions of Bob complaining about his receivers but even though that is the case it dosen't change one major fact. These products are consumer electronics products, they should be able to take extreme use and have failures at an absolute minimum. Consumers expect flawless performance when they pay for a product or pay a service fee for use of a product.


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## xgrep (Aug 15, 2002)

Peluso said:


> Consumers expect flawless performance when they pay for a product or pay a service fee for use of a product.


As a friend of mine who worked for AT&T before deregulation used to say, "when was the last time you picked up the phone to make a call, expecting that there might not be a dial tone?". Sad to say, this is not what we've come to expect from either E* or MS products. You say you like the reliability and stability of unix. Remember where it was invented?

x


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## Peluso (Sep 11, 2002)

xgrep said:


> As a friend of mine who worked for AT&T before deregulation used to say, "when was the last time you picked up the phone to make a call, expecting that there might not be a dial tone?".


About ten minutes ago when I used my AT&T cell phone, and i'm not being sarcastic, i'm being very serious.

I have sold telecom products for years and years. Every single aspect of the network was based on reliability not features. Look at the industry as a whole, not just the financial ups and downs but the options and features we have today that we wouldn't have if AT&T stayed together. Granted most baby bells and AT&T service providers still target 100% uptime with their products, and that is reflected in the tools they use and the standards they adhere too. It's also an example of a mature technology and a mature product.

My guess is that when PVR technologies are as ubiquitous as the VCR is or the DVD then we will see a serious push for reliability with the products.


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## Bob Haller (Mar 24, 2002)

Well BEFORE I added the UPS, perhaps nearly a year ago good old duquesne lights highly not reliable system would have blackouts neary every day reset all the boxes. Power lines arent 100% they are a excellent example of mostly reliable.

The boxes ran better although the hard drives failed on the 508s in either case. When I added the UPS to elminate missed pieces of shows and watching it reboot they got the nasty habit of flaking out perhaps once every week or two. Yes we turn them OFF when not in use.

My weekly reboot fixed the flakiness and was easier than holding power buttons down,. I guess I am just pure lazy. NEVER thought it could do any harm. Since power interruptions are a way of life for PVR boxes and normal nationwide.

I will start holding down the power buttons. Cant do any harm I guess.


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## James_F (Apr 23, 2002)

Thats interesting. I won't comment on how I never reboot my TiVo. 

What I do know is the worst thing you can do to a hard drive is cut power to it. A clean reboot is fine, but you'd never pull the plug on your PC if you can help it. PVRs are computers and they must be treated as such.


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## Guest (Sep 4, 2003)

Hi again,

WeeJavaDude: 
I agree with most of what you said. I never said that their solution of rebooting every night was a good one. I too am a software engineer and I agree there should not be any need to reboot the system. I assumed they got this idea after reading on these forums that an occasional reboot helps the issues. It does appear they have some kind of a slow resource leak. The reboot is the easy way out, I hope they are addressing the real issue. I've assumed all along this was a temporary way for them to address the issues.
I posted my response more as a question to Bob to see if he was leaving the boxes on 24/7. This would help answer my curiosity of why he's having so many more issues than others here. I would think that most of the people here turn off the receivers ocasionally. I was just looking for some sort of difference. I read here that people were discussing rebooting the boxes; Some discuss daily reboots while others weekly. I was wondering why since these boxes have been doing it themselves for the last few months. I think it started around July 1st. It never occurred to me that people would leave them on for weeks or months at a time. I always turn mine off just to get the HDD to spin down.

Peluso:
Thanks for the welcome. I also agree the box should work no matter what is thrown at it. As I said above. I was trying to satisfy my own curiosity of Bob's usage style...Nothing more.


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## Jacob S (Apr 14, 2002)

I turn my receivers off while not in use and I thought the hard drive always spinned on the 721? Also the receivers when turned off are really just in standby but still actually on in a sense, am I right? Perhaps when it is selected off the receiver knows its ok to do the reboot since you are not using it and know to download the program guide at that time as well. 

I seen someoen post not long ago that they seen on a Charlie Chat where someone asked a question about the hard drive spinning down on the 721 and it seemed that there was some type of issue or concern about the hard drive wearing out a lot sooner because of no spin down. I remember when the Dishplayers had the spindown software added to them when they are powered off.


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## James_F (Apr 23, 2002)

But if you pull the plug, the software doesn't spin the drives down.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Jacob, 

When you turn off the box it does go into standby mode. That is how it is able to download the program guide and software updates while the box is off. 


Tbenning, 

Welcome..... Sorry if my post sounded harsh it was not directed at you but at the fact of rebooting as a fix to the problem. I hope they find the root cause and fix it instead of using the workaround.


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## Bob Haller (Mar 24, 2002)

The 721s screensaver used to leak into the programming and crash the box. E then removed the screensaver completely. Wasnt it supposed to come back at some point?


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## Jacob S (Apr 14, 2002)

Probably will with this next software release or some release after that.

Right, thats what I was saying, that it would have to be in standby mode to do the automatic reboot just the same as it would have to download the EPG information.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

When the 501's were new, we who were then suffering learned a lot about PVR reboot techniques. The concensus was, a front-panel reset was the least-invasive, but would fix the fewest problems. If you had a problem, the recommendation was to try this first. The smart-card pull was slightly more invasive and fixed slightly more problems. The final resort before going postal in a clock-tower with a deer rifle was to pull the power for 5 minutes or more. That set of procedures has served a lot of us very well.

I think a UPS is a good idea, but I see no reason to pull the power unless the less-invasive techniques don't yield the results you are looking for, and especially if this is a preventative maintenance reboot as opposed to a "fix this wonky behavior" reboot. I also usually wait for the first hint of trouble (sluggish operation, screwy graphics, slow channel changes, etc.) before I reboot my 721 or 501 (which works out to about every 10 days, unfortunately) and I only do a PM reboot if the unit makes it two weeks or more. I think too many reboots is a possibility. There is a point of diminishing returns, and it can be overdone. Computers are different, of course, but in the broadcast facility I work in NEVER EVER turning most equipment off has proven to be sound engineering practice.


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