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[toddlmr]

Good morning! I have adventured into the Alt-F world for increased functionality but am having a problem. Hopefully somebody may be able to help! My unit will become unresponsive but still show on my network. It is hot and the Blue light is flashing rapidly. The only way to recover is pull the plug, wait for it to cool down, plug back in and power up, wait for scan and then reflash settings. This happens almost every night. And the log has no errors because everything is lost. When it is unresponsive the Blue light will flash really fast. Any suggestions? It DNS REV A1 and Alt-F 0.1 RC3
Thanks
Todd

[dosborne]

Check to see what processes run at midnight. It could be that something is just taking 100% CPU. How long do you let it run before pulling the plug? Also, you may want to try posting in the official Alt-F forum.

If the system is busy rebuilding DLNA or some other process sucking all your CPU it will seem to be dead although it is in fact still alive, just busy with other things. It could also be a rogue process that is not completing properly. Another possibility is that the program is memory intensive and the swap partition is being bashed constantly.

Try leaving a telnet session open running 'top 'or write a script to dump 'ps' information to a usb thumb drive mounted in the NAS.

[ivan]

When you say the blue light is flashing do you mean the square blue of the power switch?  If so that indicates that something has woken up your unit.  This could be caused by some external switching of a controller on the mains wiring (something like the power company doing high to low rate switching by superimposing a 500 to 800 cps waveform on the power line).

Another thing, is the network led (directly under the power button) flashing as well?  If it is try disconnecting the network cable and see if that solves the problem.  If it does then someone is trying to get at your files on the unit or is using your unit as a stepping device for large files.  

We had a case of signal tone bleed over from the mains at a clients premises which we solved by putting a pass filter in the line to their computer systems.  I am not say this is your problem but the symptoms you describe are very similar.

Added as an afterthought.
This could also be caused by a power supply that is near to failure causing the output 5 v and/or 12 v to move out of tolerance when the power company does load shedding at night.  In my home I could always tell when they did that because the lights momentarily brightened, not enough to trigger any of the UPSs I use.  That was fixed when they changed the transformer at the bottom of the road to electronic switching.
   

[toddlmr]

Thanks for both of your responses! I will try an move it and see if cooler temps may help. It was working great on stock firmware... I may just go back.
Thanks Again!