Issue

Christopher
Technical Support
StableBit DrivePool
Public
Alex
There's a pretty good writeup that I did on how Remote Control works, and that's the first place to start: http://blog.covecube.com/2013/02/stablebit-drivepool-2-0-beta-remote-control/

Other than that, I can describe how discovery and keep-alive work in more technical detail:

Discovery:
  • Broadcaster - Responsible for sending out periodic multicast UDP packets to "announce" itself as a peer to other StableBit products.
    • Broadcasts build number and Remoting TCP port (RemoteControl_Port).
    • Advanced settings involved:
      • RemoteControl_MulticastGroupIp - Sends multicast packets on this IP.
      • RemoteControl_MulticastGroupPort - Sends packets on this port.
      • RemoteControl_MulticastTimeToLive - The TTL of each packet.
    • Constants:
      • BroadcastTimeS - 1 * 60 (repeat broadcast every N seconds)
  • Broadcast Listener - Responsible for listening to existing broadcasts and and taking action based on the type of broadcast.
    • Also processes RemoteControl.xml.
    • Advanced settings involved:
      • RemoteControl_MulticastGroupIp - Listens for packets on this IP.
      • RemoteControl_MulticastGroupPort - Listens for packets on this port.
Keep Alive:
  • Keep Alive Checker - Once a broadcast is received, we need to make sure that the remote endpoint is reachable, that's what this does.
    • Custom ping-like UDP packets will be sent to the remote peer, to the address / port that is described by the broadcast message received.
  • Keep Alive Listener - Listens for ping-like UDP packets from the keep alive checker and responds to them.
    • Advanced settings involved:
      • RemoteControl_Port - The TCP port to use for remote control remoting. The keep alive listener will search for an open port starting from this port +100. The first available port found is used exclusively for keep-alive listening.

I'm guessing that Discovery is probably failing for some reason. You could probably use something like WireShark (https://www.wireshark.org/) with some filters to check if the Multi-Cast packets are being propagated. But really, the answer is probably no, and that may be just a function of the router / network. If that's the case, not sure what we can do besides adding a better interface for static peers in the future, which I already plan on doing.