MiSTer FPGA Forum

I make extensive use of WinSCP and Putty to connect to my MISTer via wired Ethernet. Connecting to MISTer was instant but lately it takes a while to connect. If I stay connected a long time via WinSCP the connection tends to break which never happened before, not only that but the reconnect popup always fails in this case, I have to quit WinSCP and restart it. I did not make any change regarding the hardware. Does anyone has an idea of what is going on?

Did you already power cycle your router in your home? Sometimes dns caching and stuff like that can make things wonky. Also, do you have more than one MiSTer in your home? If both are on the network than DNS can have potential collisions depending on your configuration at home due to two hostnames. Unlikely but it's worth a shot.

My MISTer and PC are connected to a switch, both have fixed IP and I only have one MISTer.

I normally leave an SSH connection open to my Mister all the time, and it only gets interrupted when I reboot it from the GUI. You wouldn't happen to be doing that?

Oh, and more than one Mister using their Ethernet port on the same network is death unless you change the MAC address on one. They default to 02:03:04:05:06:07, and having two devices with the same MAC on the same network will cause havoc trying to talk to either.

Same as you I usually have WinSCP running all the time but recently I get disconnections even when MISTer is not rebooted. This did not happen before. Another strange thing is that most of the time when WinSCP tries to automatically reconnect the reconnect window is blank and I have to exit WinSCP and restart it to be able to reconnect. Now I am starting to wonder if it comes from my PC: I also connect to MISTer via wireless from another building and it does not look like this problem happens but I have to do more testing to be sure. I did not make any hardware change, recently I made an "update" to an application: I have Softmaher FreeOffice installed and told me there was an update which I did but the update is not what I could call an update as it installed FreeOffice 2021 and I ended up with the 2 versions. I did not like the 2021 version so uninstalled it but I do not think it is the source of the problem. I will do more testing on the remote PC and if the problem does not happen MISTer will be cleared of any wrongdoing and I will have to figure out what is wrong from my PC but at this time I really have no idea of what it could be. I also use Putty but only for brief periods. I will make some test by leaving it connected and see if the problem happens. It could help to figure out where the problem comes from. I made the post in case someone else experienced the same problem. It is not critical but I don't like it. By the way I have only one MISTer but I will do a network scan with my MISTer off, thanks to your suggestion, but I doubt I will find an identical MAC address.

On the MiSTer see if you have two IP Addresses assigned to one interface. If you do, then try this:
But change wlan0 to probably eth0 if that is the name of the interface with two ip addresses. I've had this problem with my wifi adapter frequently and this is the only way to fix it. Mine would get two addresses, one regular, one an APIPA address, which would cause it to fail to communicate out to the internet.

Thanks for the suggestion but no, I have only one address on eth0.

Try running the mac_address_change.sh script and then cold reboot the MiSTer

As for the MiSTer's IP, is it a static IP confirmed on the MiSTer, or a manual IP assignment from the router?

Problem fixed. When the problem started I suspected an IP address conflict but after shutting down MISTer and scanning the network I did not find any other device using this IP. Today I revisited the problem and discovered that indeed there was an IP address conflict. The device conflicting was turned off when I checked the first time.

jca wrote: ↑Mon Jun 20, 2022 10:23 pm Problem fixed. When the problem started I suspected an IP address conflict but after shutting down MISTer and scanning the network I did not find any other device using this IP. Today I revisited the problem and discovered that indeed there was an IP address conflict. The device conflicting was turned off when I checked the first time.

Didn't your home router report that?

It's best to assign IPs on the router for all devices in your home network to prevent such issues

jca wrote: ↑Mon Jun 20, 2022 10:23 pm Problem fixed. When the problem started I suspected an IP address conflict but after shutting down MISTer and scanning the network I did not find any other device using this IP. Today I revisited the problem and discovered that indeed there was an IP address conflict. The device conflicting was turned off when I checked the first time.

I recently had this issue also with my Unraid server at home. I had set a static IP on the server, but somehow my router had also given that IP to a smart power plug that I had connected so they kept requesting the same IP and both of them kept dropping their connection to the network.
Now I reserve IP adresses on a device by device basis via the router just to be sure it will not happen again.