BBO Disconnects

[rmfenerty]

Hi,

 

I am trying to troubleshoot a problem for my mother, who lives across the country from me. She's an avid BBO user, but not a technology savvy user. Most of her play is with robots, and everything normally works just fine. Every now and then, her PC / Firefox games "freeze". That is, she clicks to play a card and nothing happens. I don't believe she gets an error message.

 

She's on a quasi-wired connection that I setup for her using power line adapters. During these events, she can still has internet connectivity (email, etc.) I'm happy to get/post more information on her OS/Flash version, etc. I was also wondering if there was a log file I could review?

 

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and help.

 

Robert

[barmar]

I'll give you the same advice we give every time someone posts something like this: try a different browser (e.g. Google Chrome).

 

Other than that, there's not much we can offer.

[rmfenerty]

I'll give you the same advice we give every time someone posts something like this: try a different browser (e.g. Google Chrome).

Well isolation is always a good first step. We'll give that a try. But BBO is flash based, right? Have any of these troubleshooting ideas made a difference?

[rmfenerty]

Fixed. The problem turned out to be connectivity related. I'm guessing that a BBO game uses an underlying TCP session that needs to be persistent. So if the client PC jumps between connections, the PC makes a DHCP request, gets a new IP, and the BBO session fails. But let's get back to the problem.

 

This PC has two internet connections, one via the Ethernet port (through power line adapters) and another via Wi-Fi. As expected, the PC was set to always prefer Ethernet. To isolate the problem, I turned off the Wi-Fi radio on the PC and discovered that from time to time, the connection failed entirely. This was news to me, I thought the powerline adapters were rock solid. The reason her email/web browser continued working during past failures was that these new sessions, opened after a connectivity switch from wired to wireless, launched a new session over whatever connection was now available.

 

So I had a home entertainment company come to the house and string Ethernet from the PC to the router. Re-enabled the Wi-Fi as the laptop sometimes hits the road. Problem solved!

 

Robert