Raspberry Pi4B and sleepy NAS

Filip · October 28, 2021 at 11:26 AM

Hello everyone,

One problem I have with my rPi4 after upgrading to LE 10 is that when trying to play a movie from a NFS-connected NAS, if the NAS HDDs are in sleep mode (which becomes enabled after 30 minutes of inactivity so that the HDDs won't spin continuously), LE doesn't have 'patience' anymore to wait ~10-15s for the HDDs to start spinning again and start sending data ... in such cases LE will throw an error message (something about not being able to play the selected file) and give up ... LE 9.* did not have this issue, it was showing a moving circle icon while was waiting for the NAS the wake up instead of giving up ... further more, sometimes such a request to play a movie from a sleeping NAS will not even trigger the NAS to start to spin the HDDs because if this would be working I could wait 10-15s before retrying to play and by then the NAS would be awake ... if after several timed attempts it still doesn't want to play (because the NAS is still sleeping), I have to go to 'update the library' will seems to always wake up the HDDs and then the play request would work ... how can I fix this?

Thanks

**Klojum** · October 28, 2021 at 1:22 PM

I've split your question into a new thread since it is a bit different from the thread it was placed into initially.

First of all, a NAS is designed to run 24/7. Having it go into suspend after 30 minutes idle already is quite quick. For example, I've set the my parents' NAS to only full shutdown at midnight. The drives though do not goto sleep once the NAS is active in the afternoon. There is also the question whether "constant" spin-downs and spin-ups are doing harddrives a favor. I have my "NAS" (a pc with a bunch of drives) on 24/7, my choice, and it all works fine (knock on wood).

The fact that it takes the NAS 10-15 seconds to respond is not Kodi's fault. I prefer myself to have some error msg in a few seconds over an eternally spinning http://wheel.Kodi/LibreELEC has a WOL feature somewhere, but I'm guessing it only works at Kodi's own boot moment (I never used it). Kodi cannot tell in advance whether HDDs in a NAS start to snore. So you may want to revise your 30-minute setting if you tend to watch something on multiple moments per day.

**CvH** · October 29, 2021 at 8:08 PM

I have the exactly same problem at LE10 and 11 Master. I use NFS + unraid.

Worked like a charm in OE3 -> LE9.2 + NFS + OMV.

I was not annoyed enough to grep an debug log yet.

Filip · October 31, 2021 at 9:07 PM

The NAS is active 24/7, it's just that the hard drives spin down after 30min. of idle time ... it's debatable whether it should be 30min or 1-2-3-n hours, the issue remains that most of the time LE10 will give up waiting for the hard drives to spin up which was not happening with LE8/9.x and rPi2/3 ...

if instead of trying to quickly play something I start browsing thru the NFS mounts and get into a subdir that was not cached recently, this will trigger the hard drives to spin up and then any play action will start w/o issues ...

there is a setting to wait for network during booting up, I wish there would be a similar setting for my problem as well ...

**Klojum** · October 31, 2021 at 10:15 PM

I never tried this option but perhaps it'll work for you, via the advancedsettings.xml : https://kodi.wiki/view/Wake_on_lan

**CvH** · November 1, 2021 at 11:13 AM

Quote from Klojum

I never tried this option but perhaps it'll work for you, via the advancedsettings.xml : https://kodi.wiki/view/Wake_on_lan

the server is already woken up and is reachable so WOL won`t help here

Quote from Filip

The NAS is active 24/7

what brand of NAS do you have ?

grael · November 1, 2021 at 11:53 AM

For NFS shares, you can try to set the network/nfstimeout parameter to higher value than default (5 seconds) in advancedsettings.xml

Timout when waiting for NFS share to become ready?

Code

<network>
    <nfstimeout>300</nfstimeout>
</network>

**CvH** · November 2, 2021 at 11:05 AM

Quote

Up until v19, NFS access was "wait forever" but this sometimes causes UI deadlocks. Hence this was changed to a 5s wait by default, and a property added to advancedsettings.xml to allow the user to configure it. See https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/15686. On my system 5s is way too short, hence I have restored the previous wait forever with the following entry in advancedsettings.xml

Filip · November 3, 2021 at 7:51 PM

the NAS is a Synology DS418j running DSM 7.0-41890

I will test your advices and get back to you, thanks

later edit: how do I add those lines into /usr/share/kodi/system/advancedsettings.xml ? the file is mounted from a read-only file system

grael · November 3, 2021 at 9:28 PM

Quote from Filip

later edit: how do I add those lines into /usr/share/kodi/system/advancedsettings.xml ? the file is mounted from a read-only file system

On Libreelec, the userdata folder is here:

/storage/.kodi/userdata/

Create the advancedsettings.xml file if absent

advancedsettings.xml - Official Kodi Wiki

**chewitt** · November 4, 2021 at 11:27 AM

Kodi uses both locations, but files of the same name in /storage/.kodi/userdata override the embedded ones in /usr/share/kodi/system/

**CvH** · November 6, 2021 at 1:05 PM

if anyone is wondering how it works

/storage/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml

XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<advancedsettings version="1.0">
  <network>
    <nfstimeout>15</nfstimeout>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>

**CvH** · November 6, 2021 at 1:55 PM

Opened a PR to "fix" it.

[nfs] change connection timeout to 15sec by CvH · Pull Request #20475 · xbmc/xbmc

Description Change the connection timeout of the nfs client to 15 sec. Motivation and context Since #15686 kodi fails to playback files from a nfs share if the…

github.com