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Ubuntu 16.04 FireWire suddenly disappeared

Ask Ubuntu Asked on December 12, 2021

I have been controlling a cable set-top-box with a FireWire channel changer script running on Ubuntu 16.04 for years and it has been working fine. Yesterday it stopped working for no apparent reason.

lspci lists the controller
06:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link) but plugreport returns nothing. The changer script likewise reports that it can detect no ports or nodes. I have checked the cable and rebooted both the linux box and set-top-box box. No help. Can anyone suggest how to troubleshoot this?

UPDATE

I was getting nothing from plugreport because I wasn’t running it as root. When I run it properly I get:

sudo plugreport
Host Adapter 0
==============

Node 0 GUID 0x00e6bc100000241d
------------------------------
libiec61883 error: error reading oMPR
libiec61883 error: error reading iMPR

When I searched that error I found this, which talks about a permission problem with the firewire device. Checking the permissions on /dev/fw0 I find the same permissions as in the link

crw------- 1 root root 241, 0 Jul 27 18:31 fw0

I’m not sure what to do about this, and that bug is reported in a Fedora forum so I’m reluctant to try the fixes they propose.

One Answer

I'm fortunate enough to have another Ubuntu box, so I ordered an inexpensive PCI-E firewire card for it, which allowed me to test. On the test box plugreport showed the set-top-box. The card came with a full-size to mini-size firewire cable, which I connected to the other 1394 socket on my original machine, and voila, plugreport on that machine showed the set-top-box. So it seems that either the mini-size socket on my original machine went bad, or the mini-to-mini cable went bad. I have no idea how that can happen to things sitting there undisturbed, but there you have it. So this is SOLVED.

UPDATE: No it's not! :-( the day after the above post, it revered to the original situation even using the new socket. Once again plugreport shows no node 1. I have no idea what is going on.

Answered by Steve on December 12, 2021

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