active Connection Interruption

[jrgosland]

Order No 5e5a505a426db

Have spent ages trying to download and install two of your products but get constant connection interruptions.  Help would be appreciated

Regards b

Jack Routledge

[joe d park]

Same here Jack, very slow indeed

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

this has been looked into, after having been reported yesterday.

It should improve when the sale is over, apologies for the inconvenience,

it seems to be affecting those of us who are in the UK, including me of course.

[joe d park]

Thanks for the update Nick 

[787flyer]

Hi,

 

Yesterday I experienced that same problem as well and I am in Germany.

 

Regards

Mark

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

how are things today?

[787flyer]

Hi Nick,

Better today. 

 

I just downloaded SAK and did not see any interruptions in the connection this morning.

Must have been busy yesterday! 

 

regards

Mark

[yansheng]

Download is too slow. I bought TEGBC TEGBN TEGBS yesterday. The download of the TEGB library was interrupted last night. Download continues today. The speed is only 100kb / s and 22GB. What the hell is going on?

[Stratto]

On 3/6/2020 at 6:36 PM, yansheng said:

Download is too slow. I bought TEGBC TEGBN TEGBS yesterday. The download of the TEGB library was interrupted last night. Download continues today. The speed is only 100kb / s and 22GB. What the hell is going on?

 

[Stratto]

I have just taken 3 days to download updates on GB South True Earth and over 8 hrs to download update Australia v2. (just in case you think the error is fixed). Also avg download speed is 85 KB/s followed by connection interruptions.

[Ribs]

10 hours ago, Stratto said:

I have just taken 3 days to download updates on GB South True Earth and over 8 hrs to download update Australia v2. (just in case you think the error is fixed). Also avg download speed is 85 KB/s followed by connection interruptions.

 

Similar issues here with GB Central.

 

Just came back to trying to use this product after a year. Happy to see there is finally a user friendly way of doing this on Mac/Linux. Kinda frustrated these problems have come about.

 

The log file isn't very interesting...

2020-03-08T11:54:02.179Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.205Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.249Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.411Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.550Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.553Z [INFO] [Saturn] - gbr-central-xp11: 20.00%  Download Interrupted
2020-03-08T11:54:02.578Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.672Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.852Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:02.987Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.012Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.273Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.273Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.309Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.472Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.621Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.639Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.669Z [INFO] [Saturn] - gbr-central-xp11: 20.00%  Download Interrupted
2020-03-08T11:54:03.740Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:03.965Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.048Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.075Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.316Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.325Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.370Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.541Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.671Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:54:04.701Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.

 

Although earlier I supposedly had 29% of the file, which doesn't make a lick of sense to me:

2020-03-08T11:32:35.624Z [INFO] [Saturn] - gbr-central-xp11: 29.00%  Download Interrupted
2020-03-08T11:32:35.737Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.742Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.761Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.772Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.826Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.881Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.884Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.900Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.907Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:35.941Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:36.737Z [INFO] [Saturn] - gbr-central-xp11: 29.00%  Download Interrupted
2020-03-08T11:32:36.859Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:36.863Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:36.896Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:36.897Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:36.950Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:37.006Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:37.010Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:37.028Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:37.036Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.
2020-03-08T11:32:37.071Z [INFO] [Saturn] - Connection interrupted... Retrying.

 

[Ribs]

So I just gave this another go after leaving it for several hours and the progress bar not moving at all.

 

It seems the Orbx central app will just dump however much data it feels necessary into /tmp for some reason. Why it does this I'm not too sure, but at no point did I instruct it to download anything there.

 

The trouble is that my /tmp partition is 8gb in size, which is far beyond fine for my day-to-day needs, but far below the requirement for the files I'm attempting to install. Orbx Central does not check the size requirements of where it's dumping files before it goes ahead and starts doing its thing until /tmp is full. Come on guys, this is ridiculous:

1. I never at any point in time told Orbx to put anything in /tmp. I thought everything was going into my xplane installation so I didn't think the size of /tmp would be an issue. A lot of distros will set /tmp to RAM and max it at 50% of the system RAM. You should absolutely not be putting massive files in here.
2. You should check you have basic capacity of the filesystem before doing any file operations. This is the basics here, guys. If you need 16gb of space but only have 8, then obviously that isn't going to work.

I continue to be disappointed in the quality and user experience of this product, and the absolute lack of basic testing on Linux. From corrupted archives and outright incorrect instructions last year, to an app which doesn't do basic sanity checks before barfing files all over my filesystem without asking first. It seems to me that the testing goes as far as installing the app and allowing it to start, but not actually using the product, like I have to.

 

So I clear out the mess left in /tmp, mount /tmp somewhere else, I delete the config files for Orbx central, and restart so we should be in a clean state. I'm getting "connection interrupted" again but hopefully the app will make some progress now.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

perhaps you could read the User Guide, which details how to choose where Orbx Central

puts its temporary files and how to choose where to install the products.

Or are you stating that these facilities are not available to you as a Linux user?

[Ribs]

So I'm supposed to read through a 34 page PDF file before touching this software, which should have sane defaults and is designed to make this process easier? Is that honestly your response? No, I shouldn't have to do that. The application should behave correctly with the default that it picks, and should warn me if the defaults may lead to problems. That's good design.

 

Did you read every piece of documentation for Chrome/Firefox/Edge before using it, or did you just use it and expect it to work? Same with Windows? X-Plane?

 

I highlight terrible user experiences and this passive-aggressive three liner is the response? Okay, great.

 

So now I've been stuck at 79% for the past hour. This is all that appears in the log repeatedly:

2020-03-08T18:35:33.389Z [INFO] [Saturn] - gbr-south-xp11: 79.00%  Downloaded: 26.44 GB / 26.98 GB (0 B/s). Extracted: 31991 / 32249. Converted: 11675 / 11880.

 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

you highlight your terrible user experience and there is nothing passive about your statements about it.

I regret that your user experience has been terrible.

Here are the two pages of Orbx Central that could have been used to avoid the problems that you have encountered.

The default setting is "Check disk space before installing" and "Automatically backup product install files" ticked.

 

 

I do not consider it unreasonable to consult a User Guide before using a program.

 

 

 

 

[Ribs]

Quote

you highlight your terrible user experience and there is nothing passive about your statements about it.

Indeed. I'm kinda pissed off. I pay good money for what should be good product. Instead every time I've attempted to actually use the product I purchased I encounter problem after problem and it somehow always my fault.

 

I think you'd be a bit annoyed as well, in my situation.

 

Quote

Here are the two pages of Orbx Central that could have been used to avoid the problems that you have encountered.

 

You mean like this already ticked option. As you mention, this is the default. I have not changed this setting (why the hell is it even a setting?!) and yet your software still filled up /tmp and then failed without any indication to me as to the issue, not even a "I've run out of space in the temporary location" message. It just kept trying again and again to force files into a filled up /tmp partition. Smart.

 

This is a screenshot I just took, with that setting ticked:

 

This is a bug in your software, this is not user error. The software should have both checked there was adequate space, and also warned of the issue when the space ran out. It did neither of these things. In all honesty it also should be not just using /tmp in the first place, and setting this should be part of the initial setup steps and it should ask the user where it wants this, but I guess that's up for debate.

 

Quote

I do not consider it unreasonable to consult a User Guide before using a program.

I do not consider it to be unreasonable for the software to have sane defaults and basic checking (such as file system capacity) before it performs large file operations. The entire point of this software (as I understand it) is to make the installation easy to do. If you're expecting users to wade through a 34-page PDF before they even start the application you've already failed in that objective.

 

I notice how you completely ignore the other points raised and questions asked, namely:

1. Did you read every piece of documentation for Chrome/Firefox/Edge before using it, or did you just use it and expect it to work? Same with Windows? X-Plane?

2. So now I've been stuck at 79% for the past hour. This is all that appears in the log repeatedly

Point two (another problem of your customer asking for help) I've managed to fix by repeatedly restarting the application. This has allowed GB-South to finish installation. GB-North also froze in this manner and a restart of the app has allowed it to progress. Central is queued up next and I'm fully expecting to have to do the same babysitting to get it to complete. This is also a bug in your software, this is not user error.

 

I really hope this actually installs the product and it actually works with X-Plane when I eventually fire it up: I don't want to keep coming back here and being spoken to in this manner.

 

I consider your condescending tone to be a reason to never buy products from Orbx ever again. This little exchange, and the exact crap I had to deal with last year...

1. Downloads persistently failing, when I inquired about this on the forum, I was told to use a download manager (not a step mentioned in the instructions), in your eyes that was "nothing more than good practice", but yet something I've never had to do before... When I click a link I expect my web browser to download it, without the need for third party software.
2. Incorrect instructions which were clearly never checked before they were uploaded to your website for Linux users
3. Incorrect shell script files that would have extracted the files to the wrong places for Linux users and never would have been picked up by XPlane
4. Corrupted zip files which were also never checked before uploading to the website, rendering the product unusable

... has ensured you'll never get another sale from me ever again. Last year's steps were clearly never actually fully checked from start to finish (actually installing Linux, actually following the instructions as written, to the letter, actually installing xplane, actually flying over the maps once everything was installed, not just messing about in a VM, that doesn't count and won't catch the proper experience from start to finish). This year it looks like the same mistakes have been made with Orbx central.

 

You seem to be extremely quick to blame the user, and never your product. Nothing is perfect, it's software made by humans; of course it won't be perfect. You should be working with us to fix these bugs and paper cuts to the user experience, not just saying "Did you read the manual?" and blaming the user every time. I've never quite experienced anything quite like this and I have little desire to repeat the experience.

Edited March 8, 2020 by Ribs

[Nick Cooper]

Thank you for your comments.

I have not suggested that the cause is user error, I have suggested that there

are options in the software of which you have not taken advantage.

 

As to your reaction to my "condescending tone", sometimes the lack of personal contact

allows what is intended as a straightforward suggestion to be interpreted as something

else, particularly if the recipient has a point that they wish to make.

 

I am wondering if I have interpreted this correctly.

 

Quote

 

You mean like this already ticked option. As you mention, this is the default. I have not changed this setting (why the hell is it even a setting?!) and yet your software still filled up /tmp and then failed without any indication to me as to the issue, not even a "I've run out of space in the temporary location" message. It just kept trying again and again to force files into a filled up /tmp partition. Smart.

 

This is a screenshot I just took, with that setting ticked:

 

 

It shows that Orbx Central is using what I assume to be the Linux temp directory and it offers the option to

edit that directory to a different location.

Using /tmp/Orbx/temp is causing you a problem but you apparently decline to use that option?

 

Quote

As you mention, this is the default. I have not changed this setting (why the hell is it even a setting?!) and yet your software still filled up /tmp

 

Perhaps we continue to misunderstand each other.

To address your other questions, 

 

1. I did not read every word of the browser user guide. I do still look for written advice when I encounter a problem or a solution for something I would like to do.

2. I would think that the installation is stopping because of the lack of disk space, as already discussed.

 

Finally, the "the exact crap I had to deal with last year.." was with a much earlier version of Orbx Central.

I cannot comment on Linux, having no experience of it.

 

[paulscottrobson]

Well it clearly doesn't work.

 

If you look at this screen shot you will notice :

1) Connection interrupted. (No, it isn't. Your programmers are lazy and have interpreted any error from downloading as "connection interrupted". This might be acceptable if the whole point of the application wasn't to download things. Spend more time on that and less on pretty scrolling boxes. Nobody cares what downloaders look like. They want them to work reliably.  Or test it. Amateur hour)

2) /tmp has 7.9G used and is 100% full. It's not doing anything else (outside the DE/Xorg/etc). (7.9G is remarkably close to the file size downloaded)

3) /aux/Orbx/tmp has 4.0k used (e.g. it's empty). (There is 745G free on that partition)

4) The temporary directory is set to /aux/Orbx/tmp

 

What else do we see ? Well, if I look at the /tmp directory, there's a subdirectory called /tmp/Orbx , which obviously belongs to Gnome. And guess what, there's 7.8G in it. And the files or called "gbr-central-xp11.m.c4". Can't think what they might possibly be.

 

So whatever else your software is doing *THIS DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY*.

 

It is nothing to do with the manual. It is a bug. It's probably in Windows as well, but most Windows apps just have a temporary file space that can fill up the whole partition, which is usually the whole disk drive.

 

Your "application" is creating file structures deliberately, and downloads a pile of zip files into /tmp/Orbx/temp/octemp .

 

Something equally amazing. If you move Orbx out of /tmp to a partition with space and symlink it back again, guess what, it magically works again. And yes, I can do that. Not all Linux users can figure it out. Especially if they think its a connection error.

 

(And get rid of that stupid pictorial Captcha while you are at it)

[Nick Cooper]

Thanks for these comments.

I have asked the developers to come to the topic and comment.

[Guest Josh Koz]

Hi @Ribs,
 

 

On 3/9/2020 at 3:04 AM, Ribs said:

The trouble is that my /tmp partition is 8gb in size, which is far beyond fine for my day-to-day needs, but far below the requirement for the files I'm attempting to install. Orbx Central does not check the size requirements of where it's dumping files before it goes ahead and starts doing its thing until /tmp is full.

On 3/9/2020 at 3:04 AM, Ribs said:

I never at any point in time told Orbx to put anything in /tmp. I thought everything was going into my xplane installation so I didn't think the size of /tmp would be an issue. A lot of distros will set /tmp to RAM and max it at 50% of the system RAM. You should absolutely not be putting massive files in here.

 

I agree that /tmp isn't the best default. Currently, the default settings for the downloader is the system's temp path, which is fine for Windows. However on Linux, there isn't a clear choice for the default value due to the variance between distros and how user's have configured their system. This is why we decided to make this option configurable in the settings.

 

Going forward, I have an internal task in my backlog to set Linux defaults to the XDG Base Directory Specification. But even still, some distros don't implement this specification, I intend to make the new default use the XDG BDS and fallback to /var/tmp. It would still remain user configurable. I'm open to suggestions here.
 

On 3/9/2020 at 3:04 AM, Ribs said:

You should check you have basic capacity of the filesystem before doing any file operations. This is the basics here, guys. If you need 16gb of space but only have 8, then obviously that isn't going to work.

On 3/9/2020 at 9:28 AM, Ribs said:

This is a bug in your software, this is not user error. The software should have both checked there was adequate space, and also warned of the issue when the space ran out. It did neither of these things.

 

You are correct that the disk capacity should be checked and when the 'Check disk space before installing' option set within the settings, this would be the expected behaviour. I've been reviewing the code and running some tests and I believe you have indeed identified a bug. Some assumptions made about the mount points results in the disk size validation incorrectly passing. The Linux test environments all have a single shared volume so this usecase was missed. I've created an issue internally to resolve this in an upcoming release.

 

 

Hi @paulscottrobson

 

21 hours ago, paulscottrobson said:

1) Connection interrupted. (No, it isn't. Your programmers are lazy and have interpreted any error from downloading as "connection interrupted". This might be acceptable if the whole point of the application wasn't to download things. Spend more time on that and less on pretty scrolling boxes. Nobody cares what downloaders look like. They want them to work reliably.  Or test it. Amateur hour)

When Central is downloading, a byte range is streamed directly from the network into a file. The 'Connection Interrupted' message occurs when a the connection is closed or the file can't be written to. I agree that the distinction between these two cases should more clear for troubleshooting. I have a task in my backlog to provide as much additional information as possible when this error occurs. 

 

21 hours ago, paulscottrobson said:

What else do we see ? Well, if I look at the /tmp directory, there's a subdirectory called /tmp/Orbx , which obviously belongs to Gnome. And guess what, there's 7.8G in it. And the files or called "gbr-central-xp11.m.c4". Can't think what they might possibly be.

 

With regards to .m.c4 files, these are expected to be within the systems temp directory. This file is a download manifest. These are fairly small in size and are placed in /tmp so they're deleted upon a restart of the system.

 

21 hours ago, paulscottrobson said:

Your "application" is creating file structures deliberately, and downloads a pile of zip files into /tmp/Orbx/temp/octemp .

 

Something equally amazing. If you move Orbx out of /tmp to a partition with space and symlink it back again, guess what, it magically works again. And yes, I can do that. Not all Linux users can figure it out. Especially if they think its a connection error.

If the downloader's temporary directory in the Orbx Central settings has been set to a location other than on the /tmp volume there should not be zip files within this directory. You should remove these files and attempt to download a product to see if they're recreated. If so, this is a bug and we'll need to look further into this.

If the system temp directory is completely full, Orbx Central should fail to start the download process as it wouldn't be able to create the manifest file. If a download starts, all zip files should downloaded to the temporary directory specified in the Central settings.

 

21 hours ago, paulscottrobson said:

Something equally amazing. If you move Orbx out of /tmp to a partition with space and symlink it back again, guess what, it magically works again. And yes, I can do that. Not all Linux users can figure it out. Especially if they think its a connection error.

 

This leads me to believe that the downloader isn't using the path set in the settings for some unexplained reason. If you can provide you central.log file we can look into this further.

 

 

 

Supporting Linux desktop applications is quite challenging with the limited resources and beta testers that use the platform we have at our disposal. Coupled with variance in systems and the amount of edge cases this can produce, it's not hard to see why companies refuse to support the platform. But as a Linux user myself, I also know that it's the lack of support that keep the platform from growing. I'm moving forward with some of fixes outlined above and we'll try to better respond to user feedback. If there's anything I've outlined that isn't clear let me know and I'll try provide further information and be as transparent as possible.

[NorskRoger]

Hello, has anyone seen this "Connection interrupted" in 2021? I gave up updating SAM after three days and then had a file sent, although I won't download the "Monument valley" on the new 8TB drive they sell out too fast. I'll work out a use for the space, sadly Orbx Central hasn't offered a single byte since august.