FileTransfer write error

[GlowTube]

Myth 33.1 is running well here, but occasionally (at least once a day) I see a few of these in the log:

Code: Select all

Apr 27 14:30:53 E ProcessRequest mainserver.cpp:1984 (HandleAnnounce) MainServer: Unable to determine directory to write to in FileTransfer write command

Looking at mainserver.cpp this might be related to Storage Groups. I have definitions in place for Default and Live TV (actually the same dir) and I haven't bothered to define any of the others. In my case the Default is actually a symbolic link to another drive - I've run that way for years. After recordings I am doing metadata lookups, which from the documentation may use some of the other Storage Groups (which I haven't defined), but my Default is defined and I thought that the lookups would use that. Thanks for any advice.

[bill6502]

FindNextDirMostFree is failing. You're looking at the right code. Does that Storage Group have
multiple Storage Directories?

[GlowTube]

The Storage Group has only a single symbolic link to another drive. However, that drive contains a variety of stuff in its root - much of it related to MythTV but some of it not, including a number of directory trees from other projects in which user mythtv has no write access. Live TV and scheduled recordings all land in this directory without error. Could the extraneous stuff be upsetting Myth somehow?

[bill6502]

I've got a drive with other data on it and that doesn't cause any problems.

You can set -v file to get more data. Of interest is what the Storage Group
code is doing. N.B. this can be very noisy and you may need to restart the
backend to clear it. Even more logs are available with -v file:debug (which
is even noisier and I don't recommend it for more than a few minutes.

The Storage Group code will fire an error if -v file is set and no directory
is found.

Problem is that if this only happens once daily, this could be hard to catch.

You can change the logging on the fly with: mythbackend --setverbose file

This may also show up what Storage Group is being accessed. I understand you're
using Default, but I don't know which group is being passed to FindNextDirMostFree.

[GlowTube]

Bill, Going over the log again I noticed that the number of times this error occurs is always equal to the number of recordings made that day. So to me that suggests that it happens once per recording - either metadata lookup or commercial flagging. Currently I am doing the metadata lookups and relying on the Default storage group for that, and the commercial flagging was enabled in the default recording template (not anymore) but turned off in mythtv-setup (as I don't actually watch the recordings under Myth). As an experiment I could force the value I'm using for Default SG into those other SG categories used by metadata lookup (as listed in the docs) and see if the FileTransfer error disappears.

[GlowTube]

One more data item for this discussion. In the backend UI, I went ahead and defined a directory for ALL of the storage groups listed in the panel, including ones that I've never thought about much (eg. fanart). With a directory defined for every storage group, the FileTransfer error has not occurred again. That's great. So when the Myth documentation says that any storage groups without an explicit directory definition will use the Default definition, that does not appear to be the case here - at least one Group needed its own definition. But which one(s)? With the error message no longer appearing I didn't try to isolate it further.