SmartSDR CAT missing VSP

Lewis Cheek

Missing VSP, see error message

Lewis Cheek

Running version 1.5.1.152. No issues until this morning

Rick Hadley - W0FG

Got to "Services" in Windows and look for VSP.  Windows has turned off the automatic start.  Start it manually and change the setting to "Automatic" or "Automatic Delayer'.  It happens to me everytime Windows does an update.

Bob G W1GLV

The actual service name is "Virtual Service Port kit". The reason I'm saying this Rick is if a person is looking for "VSP" he/she will never find it.

Lewis Cheek

Thanks, seems to be working, now if I can remember the next time

73's
Lew
N4CO

Martin AA6E

Me too!  I frequently see this message.  I reported it, and support folks told me how to manually start the service, which I can do, but it is only a workaround.  The problem seems to be related to delays with Windows startup on a "big" machine with lots of things to do during boot up.  Even setting the service startup to "retry" several times does not always solve the problem.  The message to affected users seems to be that SSDR CAT is only a bridging strategy until the world catches up to native SSDR interfaces.  That's fine, but it doesn't help in the here and now.

Bob G W1GLV

Martin, the service must be set to automatic. Windows loads services early in the startup process and sometimes the service will not function properly if loaded too late.

Martin AA6E

Tnx Bob -

The service is set to automatic, and the "recovery" options are set to restart the service -- as suggested by FRS.  (On "first failure", "second failure", and "subsequent failures"! We also have the option to have the system reboot itself upon service failure, but that seems a tad excessive.) Still, the service fails maybe 30-50% of the time on cold startup on my i7-920 system.

If I wait for the machine to quiet down after boot up, I can always start the service manually - from the Win7 "Services" dialog.  Then I have to start SSDR CAT manually, also.

It's not the worst problem to have, but it indicates that SSDR CAT needs a little work.

Tim - W4TME

We are going to be adding the automatic restart on service timeout (which I strongly suspect was Lewis' issue) to the FlexVSP service in an upcoming release of SmartSDR.

Tim - W4TME

Martin - do you by chance have a solid state hard drive for your boot disk?  We are seeing instances on fast machines where the boot process is no longer disk bound causing processes to timeout or fail to start altogether.  We are trying to characterize this issue, but it is very machine / OS / and installed apps dependent.

Martin AA6E

Tim - No SSD on my system.  I do have some background apps that automatically start up, like BOINC.  (BOINC runs big scientific jobs in the background. I find that I can "donate" > 50% of my system this way without apparently hurting SSDR.)  I haven't tried experimenting by removing this service. It might help with VSP startup.  There may also be "cobwebs" in the system from earlier development projects.  (Sigh.)

I do have a slow boot.  It can take nearly 5 minutes from boot to quiescent desktop.  Ironically, my "slower" systems boot a lot faster. (Time to reload the OS? Migrate to W10? I can give you more details off line.