Need to reset Joeys every morning to do Apps

[jammer13]

I have an H3 and 3 Joeys and every morning if I press the Apps button (or get to an app through the menu) for the Joeys only - the Joeys will no longer respond to any remote key inputs. U309 has not helped this problem. I don't see a lot of others reporting this problem or am I wrong? You can see details on a dish network support thread I started (since I can't do links the title is "Joeys Freeze Every Morning") but came here to get some broader feedback. If I'm the only one then that would seem to point to some sort of hardware issue vs software. Once I reset the Joey it at least will do apps (although still may have the Netflix freeze/reset problem I've seen reported). I've chatted (online) with Dish twice and they've given me two different trouble ticket numbers - I have no idea if they're aware of the problem in general although the first CSR chat guy wanted me to give them "time" to fix the issues.

Anyone else having the morning "freeze out"?

 

[AKosloski]

Apps Team QA here - We haven't been able to reproduce this issue and have had no other reports of it happening. Would you mind providing your Receiver ID? This will help us investigate the issue. Thank you!

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NOTE FROM SCOTT - I have VERIFIED that this user is from the Operations Team and it is SAFE to PM him with the info that was requested. Thanks for allowing us to confirm this!
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[Lt Disher]

You may want to confirm that AKosloski is truly a QA person with DISH before giving your receiver ID to him. It is his first post and he is not listed in RED as a DISH rep.

 

[Ronnie-]

You may want to confirm that AKosloski is truly a QA person with DISH before giving your receiver ID to him. It is his first post and he is not listed in RED as a DISH rep.

Sound advice. As good intentioned as it might be, I would not recommend giving out any information to anyone but confirmed dish employees (DIRT).

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Indeed, I would not send the information. I have a note to DISH trying to confirm, the users IP address is not a DISH or Echostar IP, and in fact not even in the country so for your safety I would not provide that info at this time.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I have been able to confirm and verify that the user is indeed part of the DISH Operations Team and was requested to come here to try helping with this issue. It is safe to send this user your receiver info.

Thanks for letting us know and for requesting validation before sending personal info.

 

[jammer13]

Apps Team QA here - We haven't been able to reproduce this issue and have had no other reports of it happening. Would you mind providing your Receiver ID? This will help us investigate the issue. Thank you!

*************************************************************************************************************
NOTE FROM SCOTT - I have VERIFIED that this user is from the Operations Team and it is SAFE to PM him with the info that was requested. Thanks for allowing us to confirm this!
*************************************************************************************************************

AKosloski - PM sent. Thanks for the offer to help!

Other responders - Thanks for watching out for my safety/privacy.

 

[jammer13]

Ok, well it's been a few weeks and I've sort of had Dish go radio silent on this one in spite of the offer to help. DIRT even seems to be having trouble getting a response so I'm back to trying to resolve myself. I called Tech Support and the only thing I hadn't done was a "whole home reset" which I did with no improvement. However, last night I decided to pull the MoCA/RG6 from one Joey and see what happened. In the morning, I tried a different Joey and it had the same freeze problem but then reconnected the MoCA to the first Joey and found that it didn't freeze when I ran apps. Also, more interesting to me at least, my third Joey then also ran apps without freezing which makes me think there is some sort of MoCA reset happening when I disconnect and reconnect. Does that provide any more hints as to my problem? I'm going to try it again tonight with a different Joey and see if I can duplicate.

 

[jammer13]

Just to try something, I was able to convince Dish CS to send me a replacement Hopper 3. That whole process went relatively smoothly (the Hopper to Hopper ethernet transfer was buggy - copied the same show 166 times to the new Hopper). However, it didn't fix the problem. Joey's still freeze on first App run of the day so clearly not a Hopper hardware problem with my first one. It appears to be a Joey issue probably related to firmware since it's hard to believe I have 3 defective Joey's.

I tried this today:
1) Disconnected coax from Joey, turned on (it blew my mind when video showed up on the screen because I'm running separate ethernet to each Joey and it appears to stream through ethernet if the MoCA isn't available). Running Apps still froze Joey.
2) On another Joey, I disconnected both coax and ethernet, then turned on. It shows menu and other screens that don't require connection to the Hopper. I then ran Apps and Joey froze, so it doesn't appear that it is due to any communication to the Hopper. Problem seems all contained within the Joey itself.

That leaves the question why I seem to be the only one reporting this problem? I have to think on this some more....ideas welcomed.

Temporary solution is to buy some lamp timers and turn off/on some time in the morning before the Joey's would typically be used.

 

[bmetelsky]

1) Disconnected coax from Joey, turned on (it blew my mind when video showed up on the screen because I'm running separate ethernet to each Joey and it appears to stream through ethernet if the MoCA isn't available). Running Apps still froze Joey.
2) On another Joey, I disconnected both coax and ethernet, then turned on. It shows menu and other screens that don't require connection to the Hopper. I then ran Apps and Joey froze, so it doesn't appear that it is due to any communication to the Hopper. Problem seems all contained within the Joey itself.

Why are you connecting the Joey's with both coax and ethernet? If your H3 is connected to the internet, via wireless or ethernet, then your Joey's already have their connection via the H3.

 

[jammer13]

Why are you connecting the Joey's with both coax and ethernet? If your H3 is connected to the internet, via wireless or ethernet, then your Joey's already have their connection via the H3.

True. I had them connected thru MoCA only originally but someone in the Dish support forum thread suggested it was a network problem so I disabled bridging on the H3 and used a separate ethernet for each Joey as a fix which didn't work. I've been too lazy to change it back since the Joey freeze occurs in both configurations.

 

[jammer13]

Just to close this off, here's what went down:

I ended up having some good interaction with Dish Ops and general feeling is this may have something to do with my router (Asus RT-AC66U) and/or way the Joey's renegotiate the internet connection after the Hopper reboots every night. We thought there might be something related to open ports also in play. (Later I verified using Wireshark that the Joey's wouldn't always do a proper DHCP handshake after the Hopper reboot and sometimes were assigned addresses before the Hopper which may or may not have created some conflicts - I also surmised this may have caused issue with Netflix freezing on the Joeys).

Anyways, here's the process I followed along with results:
1) Hopper on DHCP reservation (closest we can get to a static IP I guess), and Hopper in Router's DMZ (Success - Apps worked fine in the morning)
2) Hopper removed from DMZ but turned on router's UPnP for automatic port forwarding (Success)
3) UPnP turned off and port forwarded port 5101 ( the only port that UPnP showed open). (Success)
4) Turned off all port forwarding (Success)
5) Added DHCP reservations also for Joey's (Fail)

So, my solution is to just use a DHCP reservation for the Hopper only and the Apps feature seems to survive the night....