Vino Issues: Random Connectivity Problems from Windows 7 Laptop

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
#1

I’m pretty new to Ubuntu-Mate / Pis, so bear with me in all this…

I’m running Ubuntu-Mate on a Raspberry Pi 3 (Pi3) and I manage it with Vino (on the Pi3) and the TightVNC Viewer on my Windows 7 laptop. The Pi3 is in my kitchen and I use it to stream music. That’s all. The only issue is that I’m trying to create a headless system with the Pi3: No monitor, no mouse or keyboard, etc.–it all needs to be maintained via remote control. That’s where the Windows 7 TightVNC Viewer comes in and when it works, it works well.

As a side note, I was using Raspbian at one point and while it was okay, I personally found it to have way too many issues. I love Ubuntu-Mate, though. It’s very user-friendly and seems to have it’s stuff together much better than Raspbian.

Anyway, here’s my problem: TightVNC (Vino) on the Pi3 works splendidly up to the sporadic moment(s) where I can’t connect to it with the TightVNC Viewer from the Windows 7 laptop. It’s a very strange issue: It will work fine for awhile and then suddenly, out of nowhere and in no discernible amount of time, just start preventing me from controlling it with the TightVNC Viewer. It’s at this point where I’m always forced to unplug the Pi3 in my kitchen from its wall socket and then plug it back in just to get it back to a point where I can control it. During these sporadic moments, the TightVNC Viewer will try to connect to it from the Windows 7 laptop but after a few seconds, a small window eventually pops up with the following information:

Error in TightVNC Viewer: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

If I try to connect after that, I just keep getting the same error popup with no connection.

I’m not sure where to start. I know that this issue persists even if I disable my firewall and anti virus app. What’s stranger still is that this same random remote disconnection issue happened back when I had Raspbian installed, too, so it makes me wonder if it’s something inherent to the hardware of the Pi3. Surely it’s not a power issue if I’ve got it plugged into a wall socket… Also bear in mind that in most situations it seems that the connection to the internet still works because when the remote connection failure happens, the music still streams. It’s really strange!

I don’t have any firewall on the Pi3 but I do with my wireless router. However, I’ve tested connectivity without the router firewall enabled and it still happens.

What logs should I start looking at and what should I be looking for in them?

Any insights into this would be appreciated. I love the Pi3 and I especially love Ubuntu-Mate but if I can’t manage all this via some sort of reliable remote capability that doesn’t sporadically prevent me from managing it, well, it’s pretty useless to me.

Thanks in advance.

#2

I assume the control link is via wireless as well as the internet link?
Just recently I’ve noticed a number of postings in various forums which relate to (similar?) connectivity problems, which turn out to be router related. I have chznged my router twice in the pzst few months, just to get over a DHCP allocation problem.
Derek

#3

Yes, it is via wireless. The router I have is a Frontier D2200D. I have no forwarding rules on it and the firewall is set to minimum. If this is a DHCP issue, where should I start in trying to fix this? (Well, first, how can I determine it’s even a DHCP issue at all?)

#4

Sorry if I got you on a red-herring. I merely meant to show one type of problem I experienced.
Yours is most likely different, and I can only suggest the system logs as a possible source of help
Derek

#5

No worries but for whatever it’s worth, I’ve been keeping tabs on this and doing whatever I can to observe the situation with a finer lens and I noticed something interesting just happen… I currently have music streaming from 181FM and at the time, I had an open VNC Viewer window open (which I usually keep it up while I’m doing things on the laptop). What happened is this: I overheard in my kitchen the music begin to cut out intermittently. So I looked at my wireless router’s lights to see if the DSL connection light was off. It wasn’t. I then looked at the VNC Viewer window and it was black despite moving my mouse around in it to “wake it up.” Nothing came up, and eventually, I received the following pop-up from VNC Viewer:

tightvnc failed to recv data from socket

So it’s beginning to sound more and more like it is related to the router as I can’t think of anything that would cause something like a socket issue. What’s stranger still is the fact that the music never completely stopped. It sputtered for about 15 seconds or so, then went on normally with no problems except the fact that I can now not log into the Pi3 via VNC Viewer. It’s like the server has stopped or something.

So frustrating…