Flukso minute readings + ping work; no output to flukso.net

My Flukso does not have a very strong signal and sometimes loses connectivity to flukso.net it seems. I have pinged the flukso for a few hours and see about 5% packet loss (due to the bad signal), but can use the minute-graph to see the current output. The hour/day graph however does not update for hours and usually needs me to either reset (and lose data) the flukso, or connect my laptop to the ethernet port (save settings at sensor-page).

Could it be possible to change any settings to make the Flukso less sensitive to connection problems (or make the flukso retry to establish a connection more often)?

wessel99's picture

I just reconnected the laptop (again), without powering off the FLM02, scanned for wireless networks and voila it connected again. I do however have a straight line for the past 3.5 hours e.g. no data sent?

icarus75's picture

1/ What's the wifi link quality? Look at the local system page under the wifi paragraph, first column. It should say something like xx/70.
2/ There might be multipath fading at work. If this is the case, moving your FLM or its antenna slightly can change the link quality significantly.
3/ A flat line is not the expected behaviour if you haven't restarted the FLM. Readings should be buffered and sent in bulk once the connection is re-established. Are you sure you did not change any other settings in the meanwhile? A reconfiguration can also cause a daemon restart.

wessel99's picture

1/ Wifi link is weak (between 17 and 27/70).

2/ will shift the antenna's a bit

3/ I didn't touch anything of the AP config or the FLM yesterday and still got a flat line for 19 straight hours (2300 - 1800). Will send you a picture of it.

wessel99's picture

OK; at first I thought that shifting the antenna's worked; I got a bit less disconnects (about 2% packet loss). Yesterday however I observed the same behaviour. Nagios does indeed show that the device goes down (and back up) when the line goes straight, but still I expect this to be undesired behaviour?

http://s8.postimage.org/wfjb4120l/flukso_29sept.jpg

bazzle's picture

Wait another day or so. In another post the flukso server went down and gave similar line.

Bazzle

icarus75's picture

Your FLM did indeed go through a restart on 26/8 at 16h.

1/ Did you have any power cuts at that time?
2/ How does nagios monitor the FLM?
3/ What type of wifi security are you using? WEP/WPA/WPA2?

wessel99's picture

1/ no powercuts
2/ via a ping check (i only started this to check whether it connects or not)
3/ WPA after having read a thread that WPA2 might cause issues

Behaviour that I see when this happens is that it connects to wifi, gets an ip and disconnects, every few seconds. (even though if I ping from my laptopt that seems to work).

fusionpower's picture

If your Flukso wireless reception is low it may be susceptible to intermittent interferers. Maybe a neighbour that has a wifi on the same or nearby channel that has a device near your Flukso that is only on infrequently. When you get the flat line maybe do a scan and see what devices you see that may be causing your Flukso to drop its connection. Worth checking if your signal is marginal,
Maybe other Fluksonians can think of something else that might cause the symptoms you are seeing.

icarus75's picture

And the problem still occurred with wifi in WPA?

wessel99's picture

Yes, the 2nd flat line (and reboot as you concluded?) occurred while in WPA mode (AES/tkip config at the accesspoint).

icarus75's picture

Ok. Let's keep an eye on this. If you see the same behavior again, don't reboot the FLM. Just report back and we can do some troubleshooting.

wessel99's picture

Just to confirm: neither of the time was there any outside interference e.g. no power loss or reboot from my side.

Bart: did you have access to any logs that you say that it rebooted? If so I'm curious why it did.

icarus75's picture

I could deduct the time of reboot by the FLM's reported uptime. The syslogs on the FLM are not persisted as this would consume too many flash write cycles. That's why its best to leave the FLM running when the issue occurs and ssh into the device via the ethernet port for troubleshooting.