"Vero V"... experiences

Yo, dudes, dudettes and small green furry creatures from Alpha Centauri…

Long time no visit; for some reason I apparently stopped receiving e-mails and, since all 4 of our "Vero 2"s had long since got stuck in a permanent reboot cycle of death I’d kinda’ forgotten about OSMC… until I received an e-mail from Sam with a special offer on the “Vero V”, so I thought “Why not? After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen?..”.
It turned up… a week ago? Initially tried to set it up, gave up, have come back to it today. So where am I?

I removed the “Vero 2” (in my office) and replaced it with the “Vero V”. The “Vero 2” was on “HDMI1” of the LG 3D TV in here, but I’ve since moved it to an input of a 4 way HDMI switchbox connected to “HDMI3”. I’ll come back to that in a moment… I changed the MAC address for the associated IP in our DHCP server (nothing gets onto our networks without my say-so) and powered up the “Vero V”…

… hm.
OK, so the first thing I noticed/remembered was how bloody annoying the Kodi UI is, particularly in terms of checkboxes being an empty white square (which looks like an unchecked option box in, like, every other UI…) when selected, and a grey box when not. Oh, and I see that while the “Vero V” doesn’t need an external dongle for the remote control, it’s just as bloody useless as it was with all our “Vero 2” units - completely ignores about 15% of the button presses (particularly noticeable with a UI where sometimes you have to press “Left-Arrow” and sometimes you have to press “Return”, because it’s really annoyingly inconsistent). And… and… and… and… And it all reminded me why I gave up on our “Vero 2” units (along with the fact they wouldn’t play most of our 3D Blu-Ray ISO rips…).

Sigh…

OK, so having got past that, where am I?
I have a system to which I can’t connect via “ssh”, despite having (I think…) selected the “Do you want to enable ‘ssh’?” option: If I try, I get a 2 minute timeout and the connection closed:

% date ; ssh osmc@193.119.171.63 ; date
Fri 10 May 22:42:53 BST 2024
Connection closed by 193.119.171.63 port 22
Fri 10 May 22:44:54 BST 2024
%

Zero user interaction. Incidentally, I assume the “osmc” “ssh” (OS level) password is sync.ed to the “osmc” user password in the web UI? If not, presumably it’s something nice and secure like “osmc”…

Same thing happens if I (enable and) try the web UI - see screenshots. Connections just eventually get closed by the “Vero V” without, generally, having done anything useful whatsoever.

So how about local storage? I plugged the “WD Passport” USB 3 drive from the “Vero 2” into the “Vero V”… and it doesn’t even see it. If I look at, for example, “Automatically mounted devices” I see “/tee” (?!) and nothing else. Oh, and not having a USB port on the back of the “Vero V” is really irritating, as it means having to have USB lead(s) sticking out of the side…

Network storage? I found once, and now can’t again (did I mention that the UI sucks?), an option to browse network sources. OK, IIRC it was once per media type (sigh… have ONE library and if someone wants to watch videos, show them the video items in the library; if they want to listen to audio, show them… honestly, it’s not rocket science, though I appreciate that’s the realms of Kodi rather than OSMC), but still. I’ve set the SMB “workgroup” (even though we don’t use a “workgroup” here, we use a domain, and the UI apparently has absolutely zero support for AD domains even though the OS fully does) and can I see any of the local SMB servers? No, I can not. How about NFS? Well, the “Vero 2” was quite happy with NFS mounts from our local server; the “Vero V” can’t see a single one. All it can see is a legacy share from a “Windows Server”. And yes, I’ve tried setting the user squash options, and all the usual similar nonsense - no dice.

So I appear to be sitting here with what’s functionally a brick, albeit a more stylishly designed one than the "Vero 2"s. It’ll display some on-screen menus, but that’s about it. Oh, and that reminds me - HDMI inputs…
The “Vero 2” was plugged into “HDMI1”. That input is now occupied by a “SkyQ” minibox. However something in the interaction between Kodi/OSMC/LG 3D TV means that the TV is now absolutely convinced that the “Vero V” is on “HDMI1”, and so whenever the “Vero V” has timed out (which I’ve told it not to do) and I press a button… possibly twice… on the remote, the TV automatically changes channel to the wrong input, so it’d be useful to know how to change whatever ID is being exchanged between the “Vero V” and TV to stop that annoying behaviour…

At this point I have literally no idea what to do. I can enable debug logs, but since I can’t get at them that’d be pointless. The on-screen UI is useless for anything other than actually playing media (and not very good at that), the web UI just plain doesn’t work, and there’s no “ssh” access to poke anything at an OS level.

All suggestions, including, at this point, “Chuck it in the bin”, welcome…

Oh, and hi again, folks!

Tris.

(now, I wonder where I’ll be able actually to attach the web UI screenshots I’ve got, as there doesn’t appear to be any way to do so when creating a new topic…)

Hm.

Still can’t see a way to attach files (screenshots), and simple text has apparently managed to screw the formatting six ways from Sunday…

Friday night here. I will pick this up shortly.
We will get you up and running.

Sam

193.119.171.63

This looks like a publicly addressable IP address.

If you exposed this to the internet without changing the default password you probably got compromised and someone may have changed the password.

I would immediately reinstall OSMC to secure your network and the device. I will help with your other issues shortly.

OK, let’s get stuck in.

First and foremost, you must reinstall OSMC. See Reinstalling OSMC - Vero 4K - OSMC. You have exposed the device to the internet publicly. There are default usernames and passwords.

They are not synchronised.
You can port forward SSH once you have changed the password. I’d personally recommend using an SSH private key. You shouldn’t expose the Kodi web interface – it’s not designed for this purpose.

I’d worry less about MAC controls on your network and definitely worry about exposing devices to the internet.

There are different skins for Kodi. I am sure you will find one that works for you. We ship two out of the box (OSMC and the Estuary one).

A photo of your setup would be good. You can also see: Improving remote performance - Vero V - OSMC.

3D BD-ISO is supported now.
If you want menu support too (BD-J), you’ll need to go to App Store and install the ‘Java Runtime Environment’.

How is the drive powered?
Have you tried both ports?

A log should show us whether the drive is detected.

Easiest option here is to show us how your sources are set up on Vero 2. You can do this by uploading a log via My OSMC on the Vero 2 where it all works. Then we can help you move it over to Vero V and you shouldn’t need to configure it via the UI.

Powering everything down at the mains for a few minutes should reset your TV and make things work as expected.

Not sure what you mean by this. Can you clarify the issue and how you’ve tried to disable this setting?

Let’s not be silly and get this solved.

You can do that by clicking this icon when drafting a post. It’s to the left of the bullet point icon.
Screenshot from 2024-05-11 02-36-19

Hope this helps

Sam

Hiya Sam!

I’d forgotten how quickly you respond to things :laughing: - cheers!

OK, first and foremost, don’t worry about the public IP address because it is… and it isn’t. It used to be my company Class-C back when the UK only had 2 ISPs and my company did some occasional work for one of them. With the advent of NAT, we handed it back to the ISP, but stayed using it internally for a number of reasons. So no, that is a LAN address and not, in any way, exposed to the Internet.
I did, however, consider performing a factory reset on the “Vero V” anyway, but couldn’t find any way to do so from the menus and hadn’t got around to digging through the WiKi, esp. since I don’t expect it to make any difference - the unit has been unboxed, MAC address noted, plugged in… and doesn’t work .

In no particular order, to the screenshots. “You can do that by clicking this icon when drafting a post. It’s to the left of the bullet point icon.” - I’m composing a reply now and I don’t have that icon. I didn’t see that icon when I created the original post. I would attach a screenshot showing its absence but, y’a know…
I can, however, describe them quite easily: All 3 are screenshots of “Chrome” with the developer console open on the “Network” tab. In the first you can see a blank page with a “200” status for the index doc., a “200” status for “base.css” and a “(pending)” status for “kodi-webinterface.js”. The page itself is blank. In the second, I’ve stopped the page load (“kodi-webinterface.js” now shows as “(canceled)”, tsk tsk Google) and the page is showing “Loading application”. In the final screenshot, I hard reloaded the page and left it - this time, “base.css” failed (“net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET”), as did “kodi-webinterface.js”, “icon.png” and “favicon.png”; page is showing “Loading application”.
In each case, a connection appears to be established but then transfers no data; after 2 minutes, it’s arbitrarily closed by the “Vero V”. Exactly the same as when I try to establish an “ssh” session - sits there for 2 minutes, does nothing, then the “Vero V” closes the connection.

Powering everything down at the mains for a few minutes should reset your TV

OK thanks - I’ll give that a try.

whenever the “Vero V” has timed out (which I’ve told it not to do)

Not sure what you mean by this. Can you clarify the issue and how you’ve tried to disable this setting?

There were a number of menu options for timeouts; I’ve left the “dim after 3 minutes” (default) but turned anything else off - it’s irritating while I’m trying to get this set up around doing other tasks. Even when the screen dims, pressing any remote button “wakes it up” and makes the TV switch to the wrong input; if left more than an hour or so it appears to go completely to standby (no video output at all, though again pressing any button will “wake it up”… and make the TV change input). It’s an irritation rather than an issue, and hopefully powering down the TV, as you suggested, will resolve it.

Easiest option here is to show us how your sources are set up on Vero 2. You can do this by uploading a log via My OSMC on the Vero 2 where it all works.

Nice idea… but all our "Vero 2"s are dead - stuck in a reboot loop of death. So no help there. Plus they’re simple NFS and/or SMB mounts which even our positively prehistoric “Dune” mounts. Oh, and they were set up all sharing config. and profiles with a back-end MySQL database - not going to bother with any of that on the “Vero V” setup.

How is the drive powered?
Have you tried both ports?

Powered from the “Vero V” and perfectly happy. “Vero V” is occasionally accessing as well from the occasional flash of the activity LED. I’d poke around with, for example, “lsusb” if I could only get a console session…

3D BD-ISO is supported now.

Woohoo! I’ll look forward to trying that… once we have these issues resolved :slight_smile:

Oh, and I see that while the “Vero V” doesn’t need an external dongle for the remote control, …

A photo of your setup would be good.

Being able to upload a photo would be good :grinning: But the setup is simple enough - the “Vero V” is on a shelf next to the TV, behind the “Sky Q” box and less than 6 feet from the sofa, with direct line of sight (not that that makes any difference as it’s RF not IR). Misses about 15% of button presses, just as the "Vero 2"s all always did. Even if I hold the remote within 6 inches of the “Vero V”, it misses about 15% of button presses, just as the "Vero 2"s all always did…

So I think the main issue is to do with the networking. It’s almost acting as though there were an IP address conflict and one network stack or the other was getting… confused. But it’s not that because I don’t assign conflicting addresses, it’s just re-using the address which was allocated to the “Vero 2” in my office, and if I power down (or unplug) the “Vero V”, delete the ARP cache entry, and try to “ping” I get no response. So definitely not an IP address conflict (which the DHCP server would probably have detected anyway…), it’s just that the networking plain doesn’t work.
I assume that’s not a common fault, so I’m wondering whether the brand new hardware might be suspect and, more importantly, how we figure out what the problem is without any network connectivity.

Cheers!

Tris.

I’m guessing you’re typing this on a PC. Just drag and drop any images into your post.

Hi Graham,

You’re guessing correctly - let’s see what happens…




… Excellent - cheers!

Tris.

As for ssh did you maybe uncheck the box for enabling it? It is enabled by default and if you click the box during the initially setup screen you actually turn it off. You can turn it back on the the My OSMC add-on (in the gear icon IIRC).

As for the adding sources I’d suggest to go to settings>media>library>videos (or whichever your setting up)>add videos>browse>add network location> and then configure ONLY the protocol, name, and if relevant, credentials. Once you hit okay this should give you a new option the the browse section that hopefully should work as intended.

The screensaver can be configured in settings>interface>screensaver>

The input switching wrong should fixed with power cycling your display. You can also change how CEC is configured to work at settings>system>input>peripherals>CEC adapter>

As for the web interface if it is configured to use something other than port 80 (settings>services>control>) then make sure that you are adding that to the address bar of your web browser ie <ip address>:<port number>

It sounds like you’re using something like the Suspend feature instead of just dimming the screen as the dim feature won’t stop sending an HDMI signal.

They can almost certainly be resurrected by just reinstalling OSMC.

I doubt it’s a hardware issue if you can bring up the Kodi interface. But the box should be responding to ping and SSH.

This sounds like an atypical network setup. Do you have a network around with a more typical NAT like environment? Have you tried a different IP (and static IP) via the My OSMC network interface?

I think getting networking functional first makes more sense before looking at anything else.

@darwindesign - “As for ssh did you maybe uncheck the box for enabling it?”. Yeah, that moment was my first reminder of the infamous quotation from a bowl of petunias… All that white box (selected) needs is an actual tick in it and there’d be no ambiguity, would there, and yet here we are.
Thanks for the thought but the “ssh” server is actually there and enabled (apparently…), it just doesn’t even get as far as responding with the DH key exchange; for example:
202405112219-0001
Connect, do bugger all, time out on TCP_SLOWTIMEO - not helpful…

As to the “Adding sources” info, excellent - thanks very much. I’d found. somewhere lost deep in the UI (which now I can’t quickly find) some option to browse NFS and/or SMB sources, but it didn’t find any (except a legacy NFS share from a “Windows” server). I’ll figure it out when I’ve got net"working" actually, y’a know, working:slight_smile:

For the rest, thanks, I’ve now had the TV powered off for hours and will try again probably tomorrow; no, not changed anything about the web interface (except setting the password) - see previous screenshots; … basically, thanks a load for the help :slight_smile:

@sam_nazarko, to your points (and again, thanks a load for the help):
“It sounds like you’re using something like the Suspend feature…” - All I did was go into the on-screen menu, left the screen timeout for “Dim” at “3 minutes”, and if there was anything else there I set it to “Never” (can’t remember if there actually was anything else). The screen dims (note: Doesn’t blank) at 3 minutes; if I come back to the system some arbitrary time later, whilst the box will respond to a “ping” there is zero video output. If I then press any button on the remote (possibly more than once…), the TV will switch (hopefully not now) to the wrong channel and, when I reset it to the correct one, I’ll see the “Kodi” menu. I’ve really changed very few settings.

“They can almost certainly be resurrected by just reinstalling OSMC.” - Honestly, I’m really not interested. The requirement for having 4 is no longer there, and neither is the “MySQL” database which backed sharing the configuration. So far as I’m concerned, our “Vero 2” boxes are destined for the WEEE skip at the local recyc. centre, as soon as I’ve dug 'em all out. Ignore them.

“I doubt it’s a hardware issue if you can bring up the Kodi interface. But the box should be responding to ping and SSH.” - yes… and no. It looks as though the “Vero V” NIC can handle a few packets at once (E.g., DHCP, or TCP 3-way-handshake, particularly with data piggy-backed on the ACK) but anything more than that screws the pooch. From the way it’s behaving, but with zero hard evidence to back this up, I’d say it looks as though most of the buffer RAM in the NIC is screwed six ways from Sunday, and so it’s transmitting/receiving garbage as soon as the load is more than a few packets. That would be entirely consistent with the observed behaviour.

“This sounds like an atypical network setup. Do you have a network around with a more typical NAT like environment?..” - this is an entirely typical network setup, you’re just getting put off by the public IP being used on a private network. You should completely ignore any Internet aspect (E.g., NAT) because it’s completely irrelevant - the “Vero V” is on 193.119.171.63, my workstation (where web traffic fails if more than what can be piggybacked on the SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK handshake) is on 193.119.171.1 and the Linux box from which I can’t “ssh” is on 193.119.171.123. Don’t get hung up on something which is completely irrelevant to the issue, and with which was not only our "Vero 2"s happy, but are everything else from servers to our washing machine and bathroom scales happy. If it makes you “happy” then mentally replace “193” with “10” when reading it; as there’s no Internet connectivity involved, whatsoever (even though the “Vero V” reports it has Internet connectivity) it’ll make exactly zero difference.

“I think getting networking functional first makes more sense before looking at anything else.” - I completely agree. So why can’t I even get as far as the DH key exchange on an “ssh” session from a Linux box on the same local subnet? That, methinks, is where to start…

Cheers!

Tris.

So what does ssh -vvvv 193.119.171.63 say?

Perhaps you can try physically unplugging the ethernet cable and connecting to wifi and see where your at with that? Do note that in the network options of the My OSMC add-on there is a checkbox to disable wired networking. You should not use that to disable the ethernet jack as I think it currently also disables wifi as well. You would need to physically unplug the jack to get around wired preference and enable traffic over wifi for testing.

Ah @fzinken, now there’s a name I seem to recall from way back when when I was trying to get our "Vero 2"s to behave :slight_smile:
Sure, no problem - it gets this far then just blocks:


A while (like, y’a know, TCP_SLOWTIMEOUT) later, it nukes the connection with “Connection closed by 193.119.171.63 port 222”.

(or even “port 22”…)

Oh, there’s WiFi in the “Vero V” as well? Hadn’t even looked at it - everything here is GBE wired unless I have absolutely zero choice (“Google ‘ChromeCast’”, “Google ‘TV’”, “Amazon ‘FireStick’”, our bathroom scales, the washing machine, …).

The software for the Vero V is programmed via Ethernet (partially). So we pushed 200-300MB through the wire when we imaged the device…

The software for the Vero V is programmed via Ethernet (partially). So we pushed 200-300MB through the wire when we imaged the device…

What can I say, Sam? I’m just calling it as I see it, and what I see is an Ethernet connection which just plain doesn’t work (and behaves apparently similarly to a NIC with a buggered buffer). It’ll transmit and receive some data (E.g. "dhcp"ing for an address) but it won’t even pull the Kodi JS, or even get as far as the initial DH key exchange on an “ssh” connection. I suspect it wouldn’t manage to negotiate an “https” session either, but I enabled web SSL in the Kodi UI and when I try “https://…” to connect to the “Vero V” I just get “Connection refused”, so no help there…

Oh, and I unplugged the TV from the mains and left it all afternoon; plugged it back in in the evening; switched on and selected “HDMI3” (with the “Vero V” input selected on the HDMI switchbox) - no video. Press the “Home” button on the “Vero V” remote… and the TV kicks to “HDMI1”. Still. So I’ll investigate @darwindesign’s info. on CEC settings to see whether I can just completely disable it.

So anyway, what d’ya want me to do to try and diagnose/fix the network issue? I’m going to investigate WiFi (and unplug the network cable rather than disabling anything in the UI - cheers @darwindesign) when I get a chance, but is there anything else useful you can think of for me to try?

Cheers,

Tris.

Update:

I went into “settings>system>input>peripherals>CEC adapter” and completely disabled it. I checked the screen saver settings in “settings>interface>screensaver>” and they’re set to “Dim” at “3 minutes”. Left it for 3 minutes for the screensaver to kick in, pressed “OK” on the “Vero V” remote… and the TV switched to “HDMI1”. Rebooted the “Vero V”, left it for 3 minutes for the screensaver to kick in, pressed “OK” on the “Vero V” remote… and the TV stayed on “HDMI3”. So that appears to have resolved that irritation, though it might perhaps be useful, if something like that is changed, to put up a dialogue box saying “Changes will take effect after a reboot” and offer the option to reboot there and then. I’ll check later but I suspect the video will still ultimately time out and shut down (because I don’t see why this would affect that), which I’d like to disable (“settings>system>Power saving>Put display to sleep when idle” is set to “Off”), but this a step in the right direction.

On to WiFi… once I found it… Set that up, different IP address of course, and lo, as if by magic, a shell prompt appears:
image
So another step forward - at least now there’s some network connectivity. How much connectivity? Well, if I go to the web UI, the first time I connect I get this (got this the first time on the wired I/F as well):


Stop the page load, hit refresh (the 401 goes away at that point) and:

So still not what I’d call a functioning web UI even when I’m at least able to establish an “ssh” connection… I’m not particularly bothered about the web UI, incidentally, just using it as a means of testing connectivity.

Basically, that’s one irritation gone and at least some network connectivity, even if it’s so unresponsive I can type an entire command line before the first character has been echoed back… At least it’s doing something now, but what is going on with all those dropped packets, esp. on a box which has only been up for 32 minutes (according to “uptime”)?
image
For comparison, here are the figures from one of the servers on the same LAN (up for 5 days):

But wait, there’s more!

Didn’t bother unplugging the network cable for the WiFi test, but thought it might be a good idea actually to check there wasn’t an issue with either cable or switch port. So I swapped the leads with the “SkyQ mini-box”. “SkyQ mini-box” can still connect to the wired network without issues, but the “Vero V” now won’t - doesn’t even manage to DHCP for an address. Swapped the leads back, same.
I’ll poke around more later, but this has already wasted enough of my Sunday for now - looks, however, as though now the onboard NIC is now just plain dead.

Tris.

The Kodi web interface isn’t the best way of evaluating connectivity – I wouldn’t rely on that.

The WiFi interface is also dropping a large number of packets too (25%) which leads me to think there is something wrong with your network.

We can swap the device over, certainly (ping sales@osmc.tv) with a link to this thread, but I don’t think it’s going to solve the problem. If you could upload logs while connected to WiFi (with the Ethernet interface also active) that would be useful.

To give network connectivity (at least via WiFi) a good test, I’d recommend checking for updates via My OSMC. You should upgrade to the April update anyway

Sam