Is it possible to manually set the timeout time of PS2 SMB on the retroNAS?

[tutivog]

Hi all,

I am currently having some issues with running games stored on the retroNAS (running on raspberry pi) with the PS2 SMB share over ethernet. Basically the game will always freeze and force me to hard restart my PS2 if I leave the game on idle for around 30-45 mins. This issue has been actively discussed in ps2homebrew/Open-PS2-Loader#1246. Based on the network report from the PS2, it appears what happened is that during idle time in game, the SMB share is automatically closed after a period of time because the there is transfering happening between the ps2 and the smb server. When I resume the game, and usually by moving to another level where the ps2 initiate reads over smb, it detects that the connection has been closed and thus freeze.

Due to some hardware limitations of the ps2, it is nearly impossible to make the ps2 automatically re-establish connection when such thing happens. And one potential solution is to set the SMB connection never timeout on the server end.

However, there is no option in the retroNAS at this point to manually toggle timeout time for the PS2 SMB. (Or there is a way but I failed to locate it)

Could anyone perhaps suggest something I could do?

[sairuk]

You may try increasing deadtime = 20 to something higher in the /etc/samba/smb.conf, reload samba and see if that helps with your issue, the project selected 20m at some point in the original release, the default deadtime for samba is 10080 looking at the man page.

https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5.html

[tutivog]

deadtime is a global according to doco.

Will test this out today. Really appreciate your help.

[sairuk]

samba is a large project, so potentially, if you're going to make a change set it back to the default not 0

doco doesn't mention what a settings of 0 will do so you'll have to test if you want to go that way.

i was reading some alt doco that didn't list 0 as an option, seems yeh no auto disconnect will occur with 0 and that may eventually exhaust available conns unless something else cleans them up.

I have increased our default deadtime to 26h in b2195cd9

[tutivog]

I changed the deadtime to 0 and then loaded a game on the PS2 and left it idle over the night. And the freeze issue occurred again, but I think it has indeed improved based on the samba log:

Jul 12 02:44:09 pi smbd[1434583]: pam_unix(samba:session): session opened for user
Jul 12 02:49:43 pi smbd[1437049]: pam_unix(samba:session): session opened for user
Jul 12 03:44:36 pi smbd[1434583]: pam_unix(samba:session): session closed for user
Jul 12 05:02:50 pi smbd[1437049]: pam_unix(samba:session): session closed for user

Now the smb connection will close around 1 hour, I believe this may be a limitation on the ps2 side rather than the server. I guess a default deadtime of 60-120 would suffice.

Will do more testing and update if get any new discoveries.

[tutivog]

After another day of testing, I can confirm that after changing the deadtime to 0, it seems the smb connnection can last forever (12h in total in my test and it never got closed) between the retronas and the ps2 during a game session. Managed to load and play after leaving the game idling for 12+ hour.

It would be useful to mention this in the retronas wiki on ps2 open loader.

[sairuk]

thanks for the update, i've mentioned our configured samba deadtime on our samba page, it's a global change so make more sense there