Thursday, July 24, 2014

Samsung Galaxy Light - WiFi calling "called ended", WiFi messaging fails

Resolution

Update 9/24/14

Been using for a bit now, haven't had many problems. Still have an occasional call that goes straight to voice-mail or a text that won't send until you reboot, but the problem is much less pronounced than before, and doesn't have the same repeatability that it had before.

Writing this now because I just got a new firmware upgrade today. We'll see if it has any effect on the situation. That page says that it only enables "in flight texting", but it wouldn't surprise me if there were additional bugfixes included.

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In contrast to most of my posts, the solution to this is actually available pretty readily on the internet . I am posting this to confirm that it worked on my two phones, because people are pretty bad at updating forum posts once they've found a solution.

The fix in this case is to run a firmware update via the "Samsung Kies" software. This firmware update is not available OTA. Testing over a ~24 hour period I have been unable to reproduce the problem, which was quite easily reproduced before the update.

While researching this problem, I found many similar reports of other Galaxy phones (s3,s4,etc) having the same problem. None of those reports seemed to have a resolution, only the Galaxy Light thread had anyone confirm that they had fixed it. So, if you have another Galaxy phone with the same problem, I would check to see if there is a firmware update available via the Kies software.

Installing and running Kies software

  1. Download the Kies software for your platform from Samsung's website
    1. There are two versions "Kies" and "Kies 3". For the Galaxy Light, you want "Kies", newer phones may need the "Kies 3"
    2. There is also a version for Mac, only one version though, not sure if that works for all phones or what.
  2. Install the Kies software.
    1. There isn't much to do here. Just click next a whole bunch really. Though I did opt to install the "universal drier tool", not sure if that's necessary. 
  3. Open the Kies software, you should see a "connect your device" type prompt. Connect your device.
  4. If this is the first time you've plugged in your phone to the computer it may take a few minutes to install drivers.
    1. Note: I did have one of my phones lock up while connecting it to the computer (screen and hardware buttons became unresponsive). A Force reboot fixed it.
    2. The device needs to be in MTP mode, not PTP mode. Kies will warn you if it's not. 
  5. When I hooked up my phones, it immediately prompted me to do the firmware upgrade.  If this doesn't happen for you, the "Basic Information" tab should show the current firmware and whether or not it's up to date.
  6. Follow Kies instructions to upgrade the firmware. 
    1. The first time I ran this, I let the phone go to sleep while Kies downloaded the firmware update. Since the download took a while (I don't have super fast internet at home) the phone disconnected from Kies and I had to start the process all over again. Had to sit there swiping the screen back and forth while the download happened to keep it from sleeping/disconnecting.
  7. Phone will reboot and install, don't turn it off or do anything to it while this happens.
    1. The upgrade performed just fine for me on both phones, with no loss of data. Still, if you have critical stuff on your phone (why do you have critical stuff on your phone?, keep that stuff somewhere less steal-able) maybe back up the phone (can be done with Kies (Backup/Restore tab), or about 1000 other things) before doing the upgrade, just in case.
That's about it. Once the firmware update is complete you shouldn't have any more problems with WiFi Calls not dialing, not receiving calls on WiFi, or not being able to send/receive text messages on WiFi.

In interest of full documentation, One call I made right after the upgrade had really poor call quality (sounded like I was underwater). This was one call and have not had the problem reoccur since. 

The Problem / Full Story

We recently switched to T-mobile because they're reasonably cheap (for what you get) and their business model is slightly less troublesome than most big carriers. <Rant>took about 8 hours on the phone over 2 days to get the plan set up properly because the original guy who sold us the plan didn't know what he was doing </Rant> . Anyway we brought our devices, because you can pick up the Galaxy Light on Amazon for dirt cheap.  It's not a high-end phone, but it's a reasonable spec with a fairly recent version of android (4.2.2). 

But enough advertising, you wouldn't be here if you weren't having a problem. The phones worked fine for a few days, but we started having problems with the WiFi calling within about a week. WiFi calling was a big deal for us because all carriers (besides Verizon, but fuck them) have not-so-great coverage in my town, but we have WiFi pretty much everywhere we go. So problems with the WiFi calling was problems with our service in general.

Problems were as follows. If the phone was allowed to sleep for awhile (seemed to be 30-45 minutes on average) WiFi calling would stop working. This means, with out a cell signal (which I don't get at work because my building is made out of concrete and florescent lighting) no calls could be made or received and no texts could be sent or received. Not that the phone was aware of this, the WiFi calling icon in the notification bar was still blue and it said it was making calls over WiFi. When you actually tried to place a call, however, it would immediately end the call (at 0:00 seconds) and call status would be "Call Ended". Looking at call history you would see "Canceled". Trying to send Texts would result in a "Failed to Send" message. People trying to call us would get send straight to voicemail, or occasionally one ring then voicemail. Then only way to restore service was to turn WiFi calling off-and-on (usually) or reboot the phone. This fix would only last until the phone went into some low sleep state (seemed to be ~30 min of screen off).

After much internet searching and playing around with settings on the phone I came across this thread (also linked at top) about the WiFi calling on the Galaxy Light. A non-OTA firmware upgrade was available and fixed the problem (see above for steps).

Here's some things I tried that did not work
  1. Clearing data (via application manager) from "WfcService" and "Wi-Fi Calling Settings"
  2. Changing Wi-Fi calling preferences (prefer cell, etc.)
  3. Different Wi-Fi networks
  4. Standing close to router (router is on my desk at home, so while sitting at desk phone is <5 feet from router)
  5. Turning off voice control
  6. Turning off other wireless radios (bluetooth, gps, NFC, etc.) 
Here's some other things I've seen reports of people trying that have not worked
  1. New phone - This appears to be a problem with at least all Galaxy phones. Seen reports of people getting phones replaced 4 or more times without resolution. 
  2. Factory Reset
  3. Changing network mode (LTE/WCDMA/GSM, WCDMA/GSM, WCDMA only, GSM only)
  4. Changing Sim cards/upgrading sim cards
  5. opening ports on router


Monday, July 21, 2014

Condusiv V-Locity - setup and first thoughts

Introduction

I'm going to be pretty brief here because I feel I'm not going to have much to actually say about this piece of technology (note from the future: I wasn't able to get this to work in my environment, read on if you're interested in the problems I ran into, but otherwise this article probably isn't worth your time). We'll leave it at : managing Storage IO in a virtualized environment is a pain, so I've taken to investigating some technologies that look at improving storage performance without simply buying more storage devices. This post is written in steam of consciousness style as I go through the setup process. I try to document anything I notice and or am thinking during the install. I do some minimal editing afterwords, but for the most part it'll be a rambling mess.

V-locity is a program from Condusiv, a name that was obviously dreamed up by someone with no respect for spoken language, ease of typing, or autocorrect. Here on I'll probably just refer to it as "the program." The idea behind the program is that windows file system driver is poorly optimized for an age of virtualization and non-local storage. Breaking file read/writes into multiple chunks isn't noticeable on local storage, but can add serious overhead when it has to go over Iscsi. So through a new driver an a bunch of caching, the program hopes to optimize storage to give you better density without buying more hardware (or increasing Cap ex, as they say) </marketing>. I won't go into much of the details of how it works here (I'm still a little fuzzy after a webinar and like 6 sales calls, and let me tell you it's not for lack of paying attention) if you're interested you can read all about it here.

First let me say, Condusiv certainty isn't trying to save you any money over buying more hardware. We were quoted a price of around sixty thousand dollars (+ about seven thousand in yearly licensing) to run on our three servers (32 cores each, which is how it's sold). That's insane, that's roughly three times as much as the server's themselves cost. This more or less makes it only an option if you're out of rack space, or for whatever reason can't move your data to faster storage devices.

Setup

I've got a test environment setup. 50 VMs and a server. VMs are running on some Dell R610 servers connecting to their storage over a 6GBs Direct attach SaS link. Server are running XenServer 6.2.0 (sp1 + all other patches). VMs are 64 bit windows 7, all updates installed, basic office applications for testing. Tests will use XenDesktop to measure login performance (connecting via thin clients) and a more manual approach to measure some application launches (visual studio 2012 is one in particular we've had take a really long time to load on VMs due to excessive file system access during first-run)

Setup is broken into three parts, the VMC (controller) and master node (velocity server), and the clients. Since this is a test setup, my VMC and master node are living on the same server. VMC setup is simple, just click next and it installs inself and a webserver to interface from. One thing, it doesn't tell you to access it via the web page. The installer just finishes and you have to figure it out. The setup instructions don't really say this directly either, you just have to kind of guess at it (I figured it out because the install directly had a bunch of .js, .html, etc. files).

After that, the setup runs a discovery on your domain to find machines to install on. I didn't set any sort of filters on this, but it is currently stuck (about 20 minutes) on 740/742, we'll see if it ever finishes.

... 30 minute mark now, still spinning on 740/742.
... well over an hour now. Neither the "close" or "next" buttons do anything.
... two hours and no sign of movement. I'm about to go home, so I'll let it run overnight and reboot the dumb thing if it hasn't sorted itself out by morning.
...
...
...Still at the same spot, think it's safe to say it's stuck, going to try restarting the service. Now it says discovery complete, 1 record processed. Sounds legit. Looking through the machine list, it seems to have detected a fair amount of my machines, but none of the VMs I created specifically for testing.

After another restart of the VMC service and some time it picked up all my servers, but I've run into a bigger issue. The master node component won't install on my virtual server. The server meets all of the requirements listed in the various install guides and readme files, but it doesn't show up on the list of machines available for deployment. Trying to run the installer manually gives the error "OS not supported".

Looking further, it is only presenting the option to install the master node component to physical machines. I can't find this listed as a requirement anywhere, and the sales rep/tech people say that it isn't a requirement, but that's the only option it's giving me. 

Worked briefly with the sales rep/tech support team that's been helping me, they gave some new licenses to  try, but for whatever reason the program still only gives me the option to install to physical servers. I don't have spare physical servers lying around, so we're a bit dead in the water.

On a hunch I looked up Vlocity + XenServer (my hypervisor of choice), and have found some conflicting reports of support for the XenServer platform (PDF). At best it has partial support, and that possibly only for the guest/client. So maybe that's the issue. Looking back through my emails I defiantly mentioned that's what I was running on (and I'm pretty sure we covered that more in-depth during one of the 7-8 phone calls they made me sit through), but maybe I wasn't clear enough.

So, unfortunately this is where it my review of  vlocity must end. I'd spend more time with their tech support troubleshooting it, but I have other projects that need my attention. So, take my experiences for what they're worth (probably not much) but if you're looking to evaluate and are using XenServer, maybe be sure you're clear with your reps about the setup.

Edit: Sales rep assures me that Vlocity works "with Citrix" (I haven't gotten him to say "with XenServer") and in interest of objectivity I was able to get it to start seeing virtual machines. Still doesn't see the test server I built up as a valid install location, so I'm still stuck, but there you go.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Excel Crash: Visual Studio (10) Tools for Offce Add-in -- vs10exceladaptor

Solution

Solution thus-far has just been to disable the add-in for all users. We don't know of anyone actively using this add-in so that works for us. If you need the add-in I would look towards compatibility. 0xC0000005 typically indicates that a program tried to access memory it's not allowed to. This could mean another plug-in isn't playing nice, or you might try disabling DEP (though this is a pain for office, and more than a bit of a security risk).

To disable add-in for all users, found the best way was to log in as admin, find the excel executable (excel.exe) > right click > run as admin. Then go to File > Options > add-in > com add-ins > go. Then uncheck the boxe(s) for the "Visual Studio Tools for Office Design-Time Adaptor for Excel".

Story

Had some users complaining about excel crashing on our terminal server. This is a terminal (RDS) server that students use to remotely access lab applications via thin-clients, so it has just about every program under the sun installed on it. I mention this only because this means we have about 1000 different excel add-ins loading/available which is what I expect is causing the underlying issue. Also worth noting, Thin clients connect via XenDesktop (7.1); this could also be a cause of the error.



Other notes on server: Server 2008R2 (fully updated, x64), Office 2013 x86

Looking at the even logs, I see the excel crash (Error, Aplication Error, Event ID: 1000)

Faulting application name: EXCEL.EXE, version: 15.0.4535.1507, time stamp: 0x52282875
Faulting module name: EXCEL.EXE, version: 15.0.4535.1507, time stamp: 0x52282875
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0005a802
Faulting process id: 0x2380
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf9c61a803a93c
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\EXCEL.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\EXCEL.EXE
Report Id: ed04ac54-0854-11e4-9867-d4bed9f3434f
Which doesn't give us much. In past experience, 0xC0000005 is a generic "Memory Access violation" error -- a program tried to access memory it didn't have permission to.  The next entry in the even log is a bit more useful (Error, Microsoft Office 15, EventID 2001)

Microsoft Excel: Rejected Safe Mode action : Excel is running into problems with the 'vs10exceladaptor' add-in. If this keeps happening, disable this add-in and check for available updates. Do you want to disable it now?.
This appears to be something that gets installed with visual studio, no idea what it does. I went ahead and disabled it for all users (see notes in Solution) since I'm not aware of anyone using that add-in. Worth noting that I initially tried disabling the add-in through the registry (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins\VS10ExcelAdaptor\ -- Set LoadBehavior to 0) but that didn't seem to have any effect.