Bug Found & Workaround - QVR Pro Gold worked great but now it is not

[Mr.Bear]

So here is a recap of the past up through today with the end summary being QVR Pro Gold will not “Record” from any of my cameras.

NOTE - This has never had SS installed on it; it has only had QVR Pro Gold installed...

When I first received this NAS from SimplyNAS.com it came configured as RAID-10 with a Thin Volume. I installed QVR Pro (and during that install, it automatically installed Container Station). I then purchased licenses for QVR Pro Gold, setup all my cameras and everything worked flawlessly; including recording.

I decided to add more drives to my NAS (I went from 8 to 12 drives). I Reinitialized the NAS (which I understand sets everything back to Factory Defaults) to include the newly added drives, I still set it up as RAID-10 but I chose Thick Volume, in lieu of Thin.

Everything seems to be kinda working but it will not record from any of my cameras.

I am seeing a Notification I don’t recall seeing before and there are A LOT of these Notifications:

QVR Pro Event Notification

Re-launch process [Qnvrd]

Perhaps there is an issue with Container Station?

This is so frustrating and so far, QNAP Support is not really giving me much to go on

[P3R]

What do you expect from the community when you barely tell us anything? Yes it seem to be re-launching but we don't know what versions you run of anything or how you installed things. In fact we don't even know what NAS you have...

There's one thing I can comment on. If you had instead changed from RAID 10 to RAID 6 you would have saved the money for the additional 4 disks and had the same amount of usable storage you have now. You would also have had better RAID reliability, being able to expand storage disk-by-disk with the data still on the NAS in the future and you would most likely have had better performance for home type of usage.

[Mr.Bear]

Great Point, I knew better but was in a hurry... here are the details I neglected to add:

TS-1685
Intel Xeon D-1531 @ 2.20GHz with 64GB memory
12 x 12TB Hard Drives, configured as RAID-10

Firmware v4.3.5.0722
QVR Pro Gold v1.1.2.0
Container Station v1.9.3527

[QNAPAlanK]

Please sumbit the ticket at https://helpdesk.qnap.com/
Then attach the ticket number to here, I could help to push our engineer to resolve your issue.

Thank you!

[Mr.Bear]

Ticket# UNR-527-96357

[Mr.Bear]

Today QNAP support has had me uninstall / re-install Container Station... this did not yield any positive results, so I am still in the same place I've been for weeks.

[no8080]

Firmware 4.3.5 kills QVR Pro's recording space.

What a complete f**k up by qnap.

Neil

[no8080]

OK, fixed the issue, I posted the steps in the main firmware topic, bit of a pain in the backside, and I think you could skip a few steps.

viewtopic.php?f=142&t=143907&p=688139#p688136

Basically there are a few issues with the network and virtual switch update in V4.3.5, which stops it working, which messes up a few things, container station being one of them, and hence QVR Pro dies.

You could just disabling QVR Pro and container station, try changing your DNS server entries on your primary NIC to a local IP on your own network, say your local firewall, then reboot your NAS should boot up much faster. Then start container station, wait 5 mins and start QVR Pro, mine is up and running once again.

Luckily for me I have QVR Guard on my other NAS, so I lost very little in terms of live recordings.

Steps I took to fix,

1 ) Stop/Disable QVR Pro and container station app
2 ) Ran the reset commands on the network via CLI
3 ) Reboot
4 ) QFinder to put new management IP and local DNS settings in place
5 ) Reboot
6 ) Check network and virtual app for errors/setting issues
7 ) Start Container station
8 ) Start QVR Pro

Hope this helps,

Neil

[Mr.Bear]

Hi Neil.

Thanks for the info but QNAP support just did a team viewer session with me. I showed them your post but they did not think we have the same issue. Instead they had me downgrade from 4.3.5 to 4.3.4 (4.3.4.0734 build 20181008) but that did not fix any of my issues. This is beyond frustrating as I have been down for two weeks and it feels like QNAP is not giving this any urgency.

[Mr.Bear]

Perhaps a dumb question here but... if I were starting from scratch, do I have to do anything special with Container Station to work with QVR Pro before installing QVR Pro? Meaning do I simply make sure Container Station is installed and QVR Pro takes care of the rest?

[no8080]

No, you just need container station installed before QVR Pro,

The restart process you mention is the fact the application is erroring and shutting down, then a restart. Installing QVR Pro again will not help this normally. You will need to trash your whole NAS and rebuild.

Back up your old video files, remove QVR pro and container station, delete the whole QVR Pro directory from the .qpkg folder, then reinstall, worth a try.

[Mr.Bear]

Here is what I did last night; and what I am doing right now:

I uninstalled QVR Pro and Contain Station, the removed all Shared Folders related to those two apps, then I deleted the entire volume (I only had one volume) leaving just the Storage Pool, then rebooted, then downgraded to 4.3.4.0734 build 20181008, then created a Thick Volume, then installed QVR Pro and Contain Station, then created a Storage Space for QVR, once all of that was complete I added my cameras... this all worked fine, until I turned on Recording and the same issues I had on 4.3.5 were still there.

What I am currently doing now, is the exact same thing as above but downgrading even further back... I am going back to 4.3.4.0695 build 20180830

I sure hope this works because QNAP support has not idea how to correct my issues.

[Mr.Bear]

I am disappointed and frustrated to report that even this last attempt to downgraded did not yield any successes.

I am wondering if the last two downgrade attempts I made did not go far enough? I did take it to the point where I not only deleted QVR Pro, Container Station and their related Share Folders but I also deleted the entire Volume... if 4.3.5 is the issue, would I also have to delete the Storage Pools too and reformat the drives? I do not "like" deleting the Volume but it does not take too long to complete; but removing the Storage Pool / Formatting takes over 50 hours to complete.

Until QNAP can tell me what is wrong and provide a solution, I have decided to forget Container Station and QVR Pro... I have gone back to using Surveillance Station and it is working very well indeed.

[Mr.Bear]

No, you just need container station installed before QVR Pro,

The restart process you mention is the fact the application is erroring and shutting down, then a restart. Installing QVR Pro again will not help this normally. You will need to trash your whole NAS and rebuild.

Back up your old video files, remove QVR pro and container station, delete the whole QVR Pro directory from the .qpkg folder, then reinstall, worth a try.

This is interesting information; thank you. Where is the ".qpkg folder" located/how do I find it?

I am wondering if the last two downgrade attempts I made did not go far enough? I did take it to the point where I not only deleted QVR Pro, Container Station and their related Share Folders but I also deleted the entire Volume.

If 4.3.5 is the issue, would I also have to delete the Storage Pools too and reformat the drives? I do not like deleting the Volume but it does not take too long to complete; however removing the Storage Pool / Formatting the Drives is whole-nother thing... that process takes over 50 hours to complete - Uugghh!

[Mr.Bear]

Bug Found & Workaround

After weeks & weeks of being down and countless communications with QNAP Support (including a Teamviewer / remote troubling-shooting session) I was not getting any real help from QNAP Support.

I tried everything QNAP suggested plus lots of my own detective work… and I finally figured out the issue. There is a bug in the QNAP software (actually I believe the bug has been there since Surveillance Station). The bug has to do with Password length that QNAP passes to the Camera; in my case I have Axis Cameras.

Even though both QNAP and Axis allows long-passwords, the bug in the QNAP software (where one enters the Camera Username and Password) prevents the cameras from recording. I did not take the time to figure what the max password length that works around the bug but I can tell you that 64-characters is too long (because of the bug) but 16-characters does indeed work

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