Projectors locking network port

[GeoffMooreMedia]

We have five Optoma W306ST (not my choice of projector) in a permanent installation controlled over the network by a Medialon system. The projectors and the Medialon Showmaster are spread across three unmanaged switches in the local network. Medialon starts them up every morning and shuts them down every night. For some reason, every weekend, the network ports on all five lock up and the projectors remain on. We cannot send network commands or even ping them. All projectors still show the correct static IP and settings in their LAN settings. Re-Applying the network settings has no effect. The only way we have found to restore network connection is to disconnect and reconnect the power to the projector. This installation has been in place since July but this has only started happening in the last month and a half. One of the projectors was a re-install and has about 1000 less hours on it than the others. So, I don't think this is just something that they reached a point in their life where they start doing this. I've sniffed the network traffic but haven't found any strange network packets coming in from outside that could be triggering this.

 

Has anyone run into similar issues with Optoma, or other, projectors? I ran out of ideas long ago.

 

Thank You

[peza2010]

is there any way of working out if it happens at the same time on the same day over the weekend, and if that is true for all projectors?

[timsabre]

Network implementation on "embedded" devices like this can be a bit limited on resources (memory and processing power) and if the network becomes busy (lots of broadcast packets or something like that) I have seen the network part of the device do strange things. Very difficult to track down though. How big a network are they on - would it be possible to isolate that segment or do things need to talk to it from outside?

[Joe Fernand]

Have you had as look at 'Timer Settings' on the Projector(s) - possibly someone has decided to set up a weekend shutdown and that is clashing with your settings.

 

Joe

[timsabre]

Have you had as look at 'Timer Settings' on the Projector(s) - possibly someone has decided to set up a weekend shutdown and that is clashing with your settings.

 

They should still be pingable in that case though.

[GeoffMooreMedia]

Thanks for the replies everyone

 

peza2010: There's not really a way, at the moment, to determine the exact time of the lockup. We know it's sometime between startup at 9:00 am and shutdown at 5:30 pm but that's about it. We're working on another solution right now that will report the exact time but it's going to require a lot of reprogramming.

 

timsabre: This is kind of the theory we're running with at the moment. There seems to be some external trigger. I ran Wireshark for all traffic on their IPs this weekend but the only thing it recorded were the periodic status packets coming from the Optomas. Nothing at all going to them. These are on an exhibit zone vlan of several hundred devices that is as isolated as possible from the institution wide network of thousands of devices. These projectors and show controller are on a smaller local network of about 100 devices, all connected through five unmanaged switches, that connects to exhibit zone network through a VPN router. One weekend I did disconnect this local network from the router and we did not have the issue. The projectors do not need to connect to the wider network but other devices on the local network do. Unfortunately, there's no way to air gap just the projectors and still have them connected to the Show Controller. My next step is to try to get a firewall at the router to block all traffic from outside to the projectors. Unfortunately, I don't have nearly as much control over the networking as I would like, as our network operations center maintains firm control over everything beyond the local network.

 

Joe Fernand: These projectors aren't that fancy. There's no internal scheduling available.

 

Thanks again everyone!

[Joe Fernand]

'They should still be pingable in that case though' - you would hope, though some weird and wonderful things can happen if power saving modes are engaged!

 

Joe

 

 

 

[GeoffMooreMedia]

Finally found the problem. Our network security team has a full network discovery scan that runs every Friday at 3:00 PM. For some reason, this is locking up the Optomas. Its a fairly standard procedure for network security. So, you'd think the Optomas would be able to handle it. Until we can find a better solution, we are just going to disconnect the local network from the wider network for the time of the scan.

[timsabre]

Its a fairly standard procedure for network security. So, you'd think the Optomas would be able to handle it.

 

Like I said, the network implementation is often very cut-down due to the limited memory and processing power available. 32Kbytes of RAM is a lot for these devices, where most network connected devices will have megabytes of RAM available.

It's probably causing a memory overflow or something like that.

[david.elsbury]

You could put in one of those mains timer switches (the ones that turn a lamp on when you're on vacation) to turn off the network switch for the duration of the scan? Almost automated then :)