[SOLVED] Help: MythTV is constantly broken

[Cato Lindsell]

I usually apt-get remove network-manager on servers. It's great on machines where the network config changes (eg laptops) but can be a nuisance where the network settings are completely static.

[ajaxmike]

That's a great suggestion and it would address Bill's point to ensure that Network Manager doesn't try to takeover. I will do that.

[ajaxmike]

That was NOT a good idea @Cato Lindsell. After removing Network Manager, I have no network services. On reboot, the system says "waiting 60 more seconds for network configuration" and then says "booting with incomplete network configuration." What do I do now?

[bill6502]

I can tell you my 14.04.1 host is running fine with NetworkManager removed. Here's
a copy of my interfaces file, just in case something's missing from yours:
http://pastebin.com/dBsxgGw6 . Try: ifconfig eth0 up your.static.ip.address from
the command line just to get things running for now (assuming eth0 is your interface.)

[ajaxmike]

My bad. The gateway in /etc/network/interfaces had a typo. All is well.

[ajaxmike]

I have learned from this exercise that MythTV has some network complexity. You need to get the network stabilized and I think that has been the problem.

[Cato Lindsell]

Hopefully without NetworkManager and a manually configured static network config, your mythtv will behave now.
Would you post back in a couple of weeks so we know that the fix worked?

c.

[ajaxmike]

will do

[ajaxmike]

It appears that the problems were network related. After getting my network card stabilized myth has been stable as well.

The only issue I have is that the server I have myth running on sometimes doesn't show up in the windows network, which I understand is a common problem with windows networking. It's not an issue for myth, as it is coded to a static IP.

Thank you all for your help.

[Northpoint]

I haven't kept a detailed log of each problem I have encountered over the last three years. As I said above, the most common problem is that the FE can't reach the BE. I also said above that it usually turns out to be an Ubuntu or networking problem. I haven't tracked details beyond that. Most recently, I deleted /etc/network/interfaces on the BE and rebuilt it manually and the FE suddenly connected. I have no idea what changed or why that fixed it. That's the problem I have found with myth: I am constantly shooting in the dark and usually don't know what fixed it.

The WAF in my house is close to zero; my wife would prefer if I just got rid of the HTPC and just watch OTA. Her biggest peave, when she isn't laughing at me because my TV is broken again, is the buffering, which makes it unwatchable. She leaves and watches her 39" in the other room.

By the way, my question was not to ask for help on a particular problem, but to get feedback on other users' experience. The message I got was that others are finding it reliable, so I will keep at it, try and stabilize it and lock it down.

Thanks to all.

I would like to add my experience here also since you asked for feedback.

I use mythbuntu and I find that it breaks quite often software wise. It seems whenever a new kernel comes down the pike it breaks networking. I ended up replacing a poorly supported network card but still things would act funny. Things like the network manager would not run, The network card would not activate, Routing issues ect...

The reason I went mythbuntu was the ease of installation. It really is slick in that setting up your remote control and such just does a good job. I used to use Fedora but the configuration of the hardware was a lot of work.

I also find that mythbuntu really does not have a dedicated forum or email list that I can find. Evidently they just hangout at the ubuntu forums.

[StrvnMrvn]

I use mythbuntu and I find that it breaks quite often software wise. It seems whenever a new kernel comes down the pike it breaks networking. I ended up replacing a poorly supported network card but still things would act funny. Things like the network manager would not run, The network card would not activate, Routing issues ect...

The reason I went mythbuntu was the ease of installation. It really is slick in that setting up your remote control and such just does a good job. I used to use Fedora but the configuration of the hardware was a lot of work.

I also find that mythbuntu really does not have a dedicated forum or email list that I can find. Evidently they just hangout at the ubuntu forums.

I've stuck strictly with the LTS series since 10 and have only experienced outages when I was fiddling about. I've recently made the leap to 0.28 via the mythbuntu repos and started getting corrupt recordings. Thus began my pouring over months of commits. I am not a programmer so my reading commits is akin to my reading German...I can get the general gist of what is being talked about but no context and certainly miss anything idiomatic. Just a whole lot of seemingly unneccesary syllables if you ask me.

Eventually, I thought the changeover to .ts containers was the culprit but mimetypes were correctly registered and VLC was handling the non-corrupt files just fine. Next I suspected mythcommflag was acting badly so that got shut off. Still had missed/corrupt recordings. Poured through more commits, trying to find something to point my finger at. At this point, I was faced with the option of rolling back to 0.27 from a three-week-old DB backup or just living with it.

Yesterday while building a new unrelated server based on 14.04.2 ISO's *and* selecting "Apply Updates During Install", I noticed that it came out of the delivery room with a 3.16 kernel and had a WTF moment. Apparently, 14.04.2 installs will pull in kernel-lts-utopic to achieve Hardware Extraction (HWE) allowing lts to install on extremely new machines. I did not want this behavior but that's what I got because I didn't read the release notes carefully enough. Newer is not always better. Nuking from orbit with 14.04.1 media and performing a careful apt-get update/upgrade gave me a HWE-free, 3.13 install. It was then that I realized that even though I'd used mythbuntu-14.04.1 media to rebuild the master backend machine a couple weeks back (and that I positively recall it had a 3.13 kernel when the mbe was redone) somewhere along the restore process I must have done a dist-upgrade. Turns out, the 3.16 kernel was wreaking havok on my dubious onboard firewire chipset, making tuning and lock, well, dubious.

Lesson learned. Rebuilding the mbe today from the 14.04.1 mythbuntu ISO, hopefully with handrolled 0.28-master .deb packages to test some kodi.pvr.myth goodies. My point is, I have yet to have a failure that wasn't attributed to my futzing about since abandoning the Fedora-go-round and moving to 10.04-LTS. That says alot for ubuntu's LTS/kernel quality control considering the mbe's mainboard is still an nForce2 chipset.

BTW, the mythbuntu peeps have an IRC room at freenode FWIW. http://www.mythbuntu.org/chat and askubuntu has a dedicated forum for myth at http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=301

edit: 140 >> 14