[LAU] How to troubleshoot a zita-njbridge connection

[Caelia Chapin]

So, I am having an issue with zita-j2n ...

I have a setup for streaming audio across my home network. There are two
Linux boxes involved, both running Arch Linux; both are connected by
Ethernet to the router (well, actually the broadband modem, which serves as
a router). One is my desktop computer (which I will call the client), the
other is a headless media server (which I will call the server). The client
machine has headphones, and the server has speakers. I need to be able to
send the output from arbitrary sound sources on the client to either the
headphones or the speakers. So I have Jack running on both machines and
need to send audio from client-side Jack to server-side Jack. I also have
an Alsa loopback interface setup on the client, because I need to play
music from programs that don't support Jack - e.g Spotify or web-based
sources like YouTube and Soundcloud (BTW, I am a musician and sometimes use
pro audio software on my desktop system, but this particular setup is not
for that - it's mainly just for listening to music).

I had a version of this setup that worked fine for several years, but it
used Jack1 with the network backend. But a few days ago it stopped working
for some reason ... anyway, long story, but I decided it was time to switch
to Jack2. And I saw that Jack2's network backend isn't usable in the same
way, so I decided to try zita-njbridge.

So, I've more or less figured out how to do this, and have modified the
Python script that manages all the client-side components to use zita-n2j.
I can play music on the desktop machine and stream the output to the server
and hear it on the speakers. So, good. However, zita-j2n crashes frequently
(sometimes every 3-5 minutes) with the following message:

    Fatal error condition, terminating.

I would like to find out what is causing these errors. The server-side
system seems solid: Jack and zita-n2j run continuously for several hours
with no apparent problems. So it seems likely that the cause of the problem
is either on the client machine or the network. Apparently zita-n2j doesn't
have a debug mode, so I don't know how to gather the info I need to solve
this. Any suggestions?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/attachments/20221115/9fdbe664/attachment.html>