Upload errors

jfriend · November 29, 2011

Am trying to do a large unattended upload now (1600 images) using StarExplorer across 30 galleries. Getting lots of errors during the upload causing things to go really slowly. At this rate, this upload will take multiple days.

The most common error that StarExplorer reports is "The Connection With the Server Reset". Is there anything going on with the Smugmug upload infrastructure right now that could be causing this. Images are getting through, but also getting errors and retries.

Andy · November 29, 2011

Hi John, please email our heroes, thanks. Nothing going on AFAIK, but I'm traveling today and tomorrow.

SamirD · November 29, 2011

I'd use the SM tools and see how your connection is to them. The server connection reset errors make me think something's going on with your connection.

Have you also tried SM's default uploaders? If you get the same issue/errors, it points more to a connection issue, or possibly something at SM.

I don't know if this is related, but I've been having sporadic dropouts with my Internet access today as well. Could just be excessively high load and something breaking on the Internet backbone...which would be bad...really bad...

jfriend · November 29, 2011

SamirD wrote: »

I'd use the SM tools and see how your connection is to them. The server connection reset errors make me think something's going on with your connection.

Have you also tried SM's default uploaders? If you get the same issue/errors, it points more to a connection issue, or possibly something at SM. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/ne_nau.gif" border="0" alt="" >

I don't know if this is related, but I've been having sporadic dropouts with my Internet access today as well. Could just be excessively high load and something breaking on the Internet backbone...which would be bad...really bad...

I don't have time to mess with uploaders or debug this stuff - I just want this to work. StarExplorer has been working fine for me for multiple years for this very operation and none of Smugmug's uploaders will handle more than one gallery at a time so there are no viable Smugmug options.

I started a multi-gallery upload (30 galleries) at 11pm last night and it had so many failures that by 6am this morning, it had only accomplished about 2 hours of actual uploading. There were many failures. I had no problems with other types of internet activity, even while having problems with the uploads.

Anyway, I've seen how this goes. There's never any information on what actually causes this so it's probably not worth the trouble to try to debug. I was hoping there would be some known SM issue to explain it, but I don't even know if there's any way for that information to get to the people who might post here. At the time of my last post, I was headed out for most of the day so did not take Andy up on his request to contact the help desk as that wouldn't have been of any use when I was remote and busy with other things.

It very well could be in some random piece of the internet between my house and Amazon (where uploads appear to go), but who knows and there's nothing I can do about that anyway. It's just frustrating. What was supposed to take about 10 hours (most of it overnight) is now going to take multiple days and is going to make our house suffer through slow internet responsiveness all day (while the upload continues during normal internet use hours). I may even have to stop the upload and restart tonight.

Right now, it looks like my connection to upload.smugmug.com is not happy:

Tracert:

C:\Users\John>tracert upload.smugmug.com

Tracing route to upload-v2-1649360212.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com [184.73.219.165]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.2
  2     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.0.1
  3    42 ms    41 ms    41 ms  adsl-216-103-211-254.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net [216.103.211.254]
  4    42 ms    41 ms    42 ms  dist1-vlan62.snfcca.sbcglobal.net [206.13.3.129]
  5    41 ms    41 ms    41 ms  bb1-10g2-0.snfcca.sbcglobal.net [216.102.176.224]
  6    41 ms    41 ms    41 ms  ggr7.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.114.13]
  7    43 ms    43 ms    42 ms  192.205.36.2
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  9   116 ms   115 ms   116 ms  65.126.19.90
 10   117 ms   118 ms   117 ms  72.21.220.141
 11   117 ms   117 ms   117 ms  72.21.222.147
 12   117 ms   117 ms   117 ms  216.182.224.73
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *     ^C

Ping:

C:\Users\John>ping upload.smugmug.com

Pinging upload-v2-1649360212.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com [204.236.219.95] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 204.236.219.95:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

SamirD · November 29, 2011

I hear you on the frustrations John. :cry I've been there many, many, many times myself. But I've always found that if I can (hopefully) determine that it's on my side, I've got direct power to do something about it like call my ISP.

I'm running the same ping and tracert as you did to see what I get. I haven't uploaded in quite a while (my season is basically done), so I don't have any hands-on experience with any issues. But I will after this weekend. One last hurrah before everyone settles in for winter.

SamirD · November 29, 2011

Well, I think you may be onto something John. Here's a copy of my tracert and it looks just like yours. And I'm on the other side of the US, so I'm coming from a completely different route:

D:\>tracert upload.smugmug.com

Tracing route to upload-v2-1649360212.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com [204.236.231.1
8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  RV016.SME [192.168.1.1]
  2     1 ms     *        1 ms  FWDR-254.FWDR-253.FWDR-168.FWDR-192 [192.168.253
.254]
  3     *        *       15 ms  user-24-96-153-57.knology.net [24.96.153.57]
  4    13 ms    15 ms    28 ms  user-24-96-153-57.knology.net [24.96.153.57]
  5    10 ms    17 ms    42 ms  user-24-96-198-25.knology.net [24.96.198.25]
  6    36 ms    15 ms    50 ms  user-24-96-198-229.knology.net [24.96.198.229]
  7    18 ms    18 ms    21 ms  dynamic-76-73-147-205.knology.net [76.73.147.205
]
  8    29 ms    33 ms    32 ms  atl-bb1-link.telia.net [80.239.193.61]
  9    70 ms    35 ms   102 ms  ash-bb1-link.telia.net [213.155.134.132]
 10    48 ms    46 ms    31 ms  72.21.220.45
 11    73 ms    46 ms    68 ms  72.21.220.33
 12    52 ms    82 ms    46 ms  205.251.245.47
 13    53 ms    53 ms    32 ms  216.182.224.203
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24  ^C

And my ping is also the same as yours:

D:\>ping upload.smugmug.com

Pinging upload-v2-1649360212.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com [184.73.233.232] with 3
2 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 184.73.233.232:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

I have a small batch that I do need to upload. Let me see if I can do that and what happens. I'll report back. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif" border="0" alt="" >

SamirD · November 29, 2011

I just tried an 8 file batch of about 24mb and it worked perfectly.

I guess the only thing we proved was that the upload servers don't return pings. :cry

jfriend · November 29, 2011

SamirD wrote: »

Well, I think you may be onto something John. Here's a copy of my tracert and it looks just like yours. And I'm on the other side of the US, so I'm coming from a completely different route:

D:\>tracert upload.smugmug.com

Tracing route to upload-v2-1649360212.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com [204.236.231.1
8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  RV016.SME [192.168.1.1]
  2     1 ms     *        1 ms  FWDR-254.FWDR-253.FWDR-168.FWDR-192 [192.168.253
.254]
  3     *        *       15 ms  user-24-96-153-57.knology.net [24.96.153.57]
  4    13 ms    15 ms    28 ms  user-24-96-153-57.knology.net [24.96.153.57]
  5    10 ms    17 ms    42 ms  user-24-96-198-25.knology.net [24.96.198.25]
  6    36 ms    15 ms    50 ms  user-24-96-198-229.knology.net [24.96.198.229]
  7    18 ms    18 ms    21 ms  dynamic-76-73-147-205.knology.net [76.73.147.205
]
  8    29 ms    33 ms    32 ms  atl-bb1-link.telia.net [80.239.193.61]
  9    70 ms    35 ms   102 ms  ash-bb1-link.telia.net [213.155.134.132]
 10    48 ms    46 ms    31 ms  72.21.220.45
 11    73 ms    46 ms    68 ms  72.21.220.33
 12    52 ms    82 ms    46 ms  205.251.245.47
 13    53 ms    53 ms    32 ms  216.182.224.203
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24  ^C

And my ping is also the same as yours:

D:\>ping upload.smugmug.com

Pinging upload-v2-1649360212.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com [184.73.233.232] with 3
2 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 184.73.233.232:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

I have a small batch that I do need to upload. Let me see if I can do that and what happens. I'll report back. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif" border="0" alt="" >

I supposed it's possible that Amazon's infrastructure doesn't respond to pings or tracert requests. That stuff can be turned off or blocked by firewalls so I can't be absolutely sure that those indicate a problem.

SamirD · November 29, 2011

jfriend wrote: »

I supposed it's possible that Amazon's infrastructure doesn't respond to pings or tracert requests. That stuff can be turned off or blocked by firewalls so I can't be absolutely sure that those indicate a problem.

Holy cow that was a fast response!

Yep, I think you're right on that. When I suggested using a SM uploader, I didn't mean for the whole thing, but just as a test on a single gallery. If the SM uploader works and SE doesn't, then it's got to be related to the third party route of uploading vs SM's native one. And this would then be an issue with SM, not your connection. And if SM's uploader fails, then it would point to your connection to SM. Either way, we'd be one step closer to figuring out the exact nature of the problem.

rainforest1155 · November 30, 2011

It's normal that the trace doesn't finish and you can't ping the upload servers. With the traces posted, I can't see anything out of the ordinary.
Did you try unplugging your router / modem from the power for 30sec to reset the connection?
Also try a browser uploader to see if that's giving you troubles too.
If you continue to have problems, I recommend contacting our HelpDesk with details so we can continue troubleshooting.

BradfordBenn · December 1, 2011

Most network infrastructe routers obfuscates their IP addresses to lower the ease of connecting and "hacking the router" it is very common. Even my home router does it, so I am not surprised that once you are in Amazon's infrastructure. Also it is easy enough on many devices to tell them not to respond to pings. So nothing seems out of the ordinary to me.

Upload errors

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