No sound from XM Radio Online and Gadget, or WMP Streaming

NOTE: As of Feb 05 2011, SiriusXM have updated their online streaming infrastructure, and the traditional tools such as the Build-a-Gadget XM Radion Online widget no longer work.

If you're having problems streaming XM in general, it is likely that your XM-specific 3rd party tool is now deprecated and can no longer be used.

After a recent hardware upgrade on my system, I noticed that my XM Radio Sidebar Gadget stopped playing sounds, despite all other sounds apparently working on the system. After further testing, the actual XM Radio Online page also did not work. In both cases, the player component would just revert to "Ready" without any error message.

In the end (and for other reasons), I ended up completely re-installing my system, but the same problem reappeared in a few days. My OS is WIndows 7 x64 Ultimate, but internet research suggests this problem happens on a range of Vista and 7 systems -- or anything running WIndows Media Player 11.0 or 12.0.

Some initial research suggested that it was a problem with the Macromedia Flash player, but wiping and reinstalling this didn't work. Nor did the usual wipe and reinstall of sound card drivers. In my case, the problem happened with numerous sound cards (Creative X-Fi as well as onboard.) Eventually, my research let me to this thread, which proved key to solving the problem:

It turns out that the Windows Media Player settings for streaming somehow become corrupt/reset. All non-streaming play and sound still works. So the solution is to erase the WMP settings and make it recreate .

1. Locate the directory on your system drive that contains the file WMSDKNS.XML.
   
2. In my case, on WIndows 7 x64, it is C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Media\12.0
3. Delete or rename that directory, for example to "...\Windows Media.backup" If the system says it is locked, make sure you remove all streaming gadgets from the sidebar, reboot the system, and don't start media playing after startup.
4. Once the directory is deleted, re-install the XM Radio Sidebar Gadget. Start playing a channel. If you have solved the problem, you should get sound.
5. You can check that WMP recreated the directory and created a new WMSDKNS.XML file.
   

In my case, my "corrupt" file was 819 bytes. The new default one recreated by Windows and WMP was 10,191 bytes -- quite a difference!

Smoothwall 3.0 Express web GUI not working after update

I recently applied a set of updates to a local Smoothwall Express 3.0 box I have here. Everything is still working fine, but the web GUI stopped working completely. Both Firefox and IE seem caught in a loop trying to load the page, and it effects both http and https interfaces. After much research (it would've been quicker to just reinstalled Smoothwall from scratch!) it turns out there is a problem in update7 with the SSL handling.

To resolve the problem, log into your smoothwall SSH console, and delete the following files then reboot the system. After this, the web GUI should work:

• /var/log/httpd/ssl_scache.dir
• /var/log/httpd/ssl_scache.pag
  

Windows Server 2003 looses default gateway with multiple NICs

I have a server that is connected to two network interfaces. Both interfaces are assigned addresses and gateways via DHCP. One is a fast gigE connection to a private test/NAS LAN, and the other is a connection to the intranet and to the world.

The connection to the world is through a crappy router/firewall that has difficulty handling full bandwidth transfers without quivering to a temporary state of stasis. Over the last few months, and in particular over the last week, I had noticed that the server machine was losing its default gateway connection to the world. So all incoming connections were being routed back through the lower priority/metric gateway on the test LAN -- and going to a black hole. Odd. Users annoyed, too.

It turns out Windows Server 2003 has a feature called "dead gateway detection" -- if the highest metric/priority gateway requires more than X retries on a send, Windows flags it as bad, drops it from the routing table, and moves on to the next default gateway. Here are some Microsoft links on the setting:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc960464.aspx
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324270

Interesting that Windows essentially supports "fail-over" to secondary gateways, but does not appear to "fail-back" to the original gateways later once their connection is restored. So Windows has no way to recover the lost connections once the condition has triggered the fail-over. Since MS themselves recommend disabling this feature as part of "hardening" the TCP/IP stack (to prevent a DoS vector), I went ahead and did this. Tweak the dollowing registry settings:

1. HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameter\
2. Add/set the DWORD key value "EnableDeadGWDetect" to 0
3. Reboot the system to apply the change.

Another alternative is simple to only have one default gateway on your TCP/IP stack -- which is the approach many network gurus advise. With only one gateway to work with, "Dead gateway detection" does not activate. I did this as well, and set up numerous persistent direct routes for those connections that needed to go through the test/NAS LAN as opposed to the rest of the world.

So far with these changes, things are going good.

rinetd fills your syslog with errors

I recently made some changes to the rinetd configuration on the linux development server here. Everything seemed to work fine, but a few days later I noticed the follow wharrgarbl in my syslog:

Jul 27 14:28:11 easserv rinetd[14712]: accept(0): Socket operation on non-socket
Jul 27 14:28:42 easserv last message repeated 546042 times
Jul 27 14:29:43 easserv last message repeated 1077719 times
Jul 27 14:30:21 easserv last message repeated 680478 times

After searching around, it turns out I had made a typo in one of my rules. Instead of using the currentl 10.10.10.254 address, I had this new entry:

0.0.0.0 38254 10.10.10.255 80

So having an invalid IP address in those rules, causes rinetd to have a fit. Changing the 255 to a 254 and restarting rinetd solved my problem.

Adobe Lightroom 3 hangs on Import with JungleDisk

I've been playing around with the new Adobe Lightroom 3 for Windows, now that it's released. So far, it looks pretty good!

One thing I noticed right away was that its Import functionality (which is completely redesigned for LR3) appeared to hang indefinitely on my system. After quite a bit of research, I found this Adobe Forums thread that helped me solve the problem: JungleDisk drive mapping presents itself as a Removable Drive, which LR3 automatically attempts to scan.

Because the mounted JungleDisk drive connects to the Amazon S3 storage service, it is a slower WAN connection and Lightroom will probably sit there for minutes or hours trying to scan the entire drive. The solution is to configure JungleDisk to present its mounted drive as a Network Share instead:

• Go into Jungle Disk Desktop Monitor
• Click on Configure
• Select Network Drive::Local Drive Mapping
• Make sure "Show Advanced Options" is checked at the lower-left
• Change the "Drive Type for all Online Disks" option to "Network share"

Once you do that, the Lightroom Import dialog should be much smoother.