[Solved] FrontEnd won’t connect on remote computer Myth 31 Ubuntu 20.04

[anoldguy]

Thank you very much blm-ubunet and bill6502.
You are AWESOME! Thank you for your patience.

The remote FrontEnd now talks to the BackEnd.

I am pretty sure that during the Myth 31 install I answered yes to the allow other computers to sign on, but I am in my 70s and I didn’t keep a copy of that terminal session, so it was probably pilot error.

Duplicates:
Not sure if the dups were in the previous database, or I created them recently.
I have the old sys hard drive, so I could swap and roll back to see if the dups were in the old DB. I’m still busy chasing other bugs now.

I was on MythTV 0.21 in 2008. In 2011 I upgraded to 0.23, but had problems with the database conversion, so I gave up my previous recordings and went with a clean database with 0.23.

In 2014 I converted to 0.27. With the TV band sellout to wireless re-pack, I slowly lost my OTA reception and was not able to re-scan with 0.27. That, and Ubuntu 14.04 support gone, convinced me to upgrade to 0.31.

I did notice that 0.31 allows me to start a second instance of FE on the BE computer.

- - - - - - -

TLDR

If you are upgrading, be sure to have a good copy of your database in a couple of drives before you start.

When installing MythTV on the BackEnd, be sure to respond that you want other computers to use your system.

The MythTV BackEnd > SetUp > General > Primary IP Address/DNS Name
should have the IP address of your BackEnd computer.

You can look in your BackEnd /etc/mysql/conf.d/mythtv.cnf
to verify the bind-address=:: line is not commented out with a leading #.

On the remote FrontEnd, the active MythTV control file is /etc/mythtv/config.xml
Use care not to break the symbolic links in the /home directories.

On the remote FrontEnd, you can start your FrontEnd from a terminal with:
mythfrontend.real --logpath /tmp
It will put the log file in /tmp AND it will not try to restart the FrontEnd when you exit.

[wesnewell]

On the remote FrontEnd, the active MythTV control file is /etc/mythtv/config.xml
Use care not to break the symbolic links in the /home directories.

On all my remote frontends, the active MythTV control file is /home/<user>/.mythtv/config.xml.
The only time I've seen symlinks there to /etc/mythtv/config.xml is when a user is added later. And I always delete them in favor of the real thing.