So, it happened:
A family member got an error message and hit the reset button.
After fsck:ing /root and /myth (losing a few inodes, among them mysql stuff), repairing mysql per the excellent guide in the hints&tips section (verification did not seemingly produce any errors), I'm stuck with two errors that I can't figure out:

1 The receivers no longer receive properly. Rescanning, two of them are unable to scan any free channels at all (but encrypted) and the third manages to find some of the free channels. All three are seeing different things and yes, I did check the antenna cables. None of the cards is completely blind. Hardware damage? I tried leaving the power off for ten minutes. (Hw details in signature).

2 The program guide is completely empty. Running mythfilldatabase produces an error on line 174 of the script for the swedish grabber with reference to an undefined index. I don't know which variable was undefined or why (or what I can do about it) I've ran mythfilldatabase so many times before, but don't really know if I've seen this error before.

Ideas on how to approach this, anyone Reinstall? Restore db backup?

The real con of KnoppMyth is that life without it isn't much fun.

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

Nobody, huh?
OK, I'll try an upgrade procedure hoping that nothing is wrong with the hardware and assuming that anything missing in the db will be corrected as part of the procedure.

Last resort would be to get the export facility going and export everything I want to keep and wipe the entire installation.

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

Aargh!
Didn't figure out how the export utility works, so instead I did this:
1 ran mythbackup
2 upgraded to the same version
Didn't help

OK, so then I:
1 ran mythbackup
2 copied /myth to a usb drive

3 complete reinstall
Didn't help! Huh!
4 googled on dvb signal strength and found some discussion about signal strength vs signal quality.
5 removed my antenna amplifier. That made the receivers start up!
Aha! One problem solved!

Right now I'm restoring my old system:
1 copied back /myth from the usb drive:

2 upgraded to the same version, including automatic restore. System now back and running.
3 redoing all the stuff like samba, separate front end, lirc, sql backup script.

It appears that the trees blocking the view to the TV mast are beginning to make a difference for digital television. Right now, the leaves are quite dense. If the problem comes back I'll have to consider either a chainsaw or a radio amateur size antenna.

And I'm GOING to crack that program guide problem.

These two issues really don't seem to have anything to do with the crash. They just appeared at the exact same time... Hmm

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

Help needed! The TV guide contains the proper channels, but have no data.

I've done the setup many times before and don't understand what I did wrong this time. To be sure, I deleted all the data in mythtv-setup and did the configuration over again. Three times. Checking with the web page for tv.swedb.se I see that similar problems show up when mythfilldatabase has been ran with the wrong user (root).

Checking my system I found data in /home/root/.xmltv/cache and the channel configuration in /home/root/.xmltv. Hm!
I now suspect that the database and file system have data entered by root and that cannot be overwritten by mythtv. How can I check and correct this?

I removed the cache files and configuration file from /home/root/.xmltv and ran (as mythtv):

This created a new config file and cache data in /home/mythtv/.xmltv, but the guide is still empty.
Here is what happens when mythfilldatabase is run:

sh-3.1$ whoami
mythtv
sh-3.1$ mythfilldatabase --manual
###
### Running in manual channel configuration mode.
### This will ask you questions about every channel.
###
2007-07-04 21:31:30.842 Using runtime prefix = /usr
2007-07-04 21:31:30.889 New DB connection, total: 1
2007-07-04 21:31:30.898 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: Ludde
2007-07-04 21:31:30.910 New DB connection, total: 2
2007-07-04 21:31:30.912 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: Ludde
2007-07-04 21:31:30.913 Updating source #1 (SD) with grabber tv_grab_se_swedb
2007-07-04 21:31:30.914
2007-07-04 21:31:30.914 Checking day @ offset 0, date: Wed Jul 4 2007
2007-07-04 21:31:30.914 Data Refresh needed because the grabber relies on internal caching.
2007-07-04 21:31:30.914 Refreshing data for Wed Jul 4 2007
2007-07-04 21:31:30.915 ----------------- Start of XMLTV output -----------------
2007-07-04 21:31:30.916 New DB connection, total: 3
2007-07-04 21:31:30.918 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: Ludde
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /usr/bin/tv_grab_se_swedb line 174.
2007-07-04 21:31:31.712 ------------------ End of XMLTV output ------------------
Error in 4:1: unexpected end of file
2007-07-04 21:31:31.717 Updating icons for sourceid: 1
2007-07-04 21:31:31.719 New DB connection, total: 4
2007-07-04 21:31:31.720 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: Ludde
Updated programs: 0 Unchanged programs: 0
2007-07-04 21:31:31.723
2007-07-04 21:31:31.723 Checking day @ offset 1, date: Thu Jul 5 2007
2007-07-04 21:31:31.723 Refreshing data for Thu Jul 5 2007
2007-07-04 21:31:31.723 ----------------- Start of XMLTV output -----------------
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /usr/bin/tv_grab_se_swedb line 174.
2007-07-04 21:31:32.230 ------------------ End of XMLTV output ------------------
Error in 4:1: unexpected end of file
2007-07-04 21:31:32.233 Updating icons for sourceid: 1
Updated programs: 0 Unchanged programs: 0
2007-07-04 21:31:32.234

and the same for the following offsets until:

2007-07-04 21:31:35.799 Checking day @ offset 9, date: Fri Jul 13 2007
2007-07-04 21:31:35.800 Data Refresh needed because the grabber relies on internal caching.
2007-07-04 21:31:35.800 Refreshing data for Fri Jul 13 2007
2007-07-04 21:31:35.800 ----------------- Start of XMLTV output -----------------
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /usr/bin/tv_grab_se_swedb line 174.
2007-07-04 21:31:36.303 ------------------ End of XMLTV output ------------------
Error in 4:1: unexpected end of file
2007-07-04 21:31:36.306 Updating icons for sourceid: 1
Updated programs: 0 Unchanged programs: 0
2007-07-04 21:31:36.317 New DB connection, total: 5
2007-07-04 21:31:36.319 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: Ludde
2007-07-04 21:31:36.323 Failed to fetch some program info
2007-07-04 21:31:36.324 Adjusting program database end times.
2007-07-04 21:31:36.324 0 replacements made
2007-07-04 21:31:36.324 Marking generic episodes.
2007-07-04 21:31:36.325 Found 0
2007-07-04 21:31:36.326 Marking repeats.
2007-07-04 21:31:36.328 Found 0
2007-07-04 21:31:36.329 Unmarking new episode rebroadcast repeats.
2007-07-04 21:31:36.329 Found 0
2007-07-04 21:31:36.330 Marking episode first showings.
2007-07-04 21:31:36.331 Found 0
2007-07-04 21:31:36.331 Marking episode last showings.
2007-07-04 21:31:36.332 Found 0
2007-07-04 21:31:36.333
===============================================================
| Attempting to contact the master backend for rescheduling. |
| If the master is not running, rescheduling will happen when |
| the master backend is restarted. |
===============================================================
2007-07-04 21:31:36.343 Connecting to backend server: 192.168.0.200:6543 (try 1 of 5)
2007-07-04 21:31:36.346 Using protocol version 31
2007-07-04 21:31:36.414 mythfilldatabase run complete.

All this goes through at high speed. I think the epg server is not contacted at all. The example used mythfilldatabase --manual, but the results are the same without the switch.

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

I got help from the wonderful volunteers at swedb and would like to share the lessons learned.

The output from mythfilldatabase indicates an error:

2007-07-04 21:31:30.915 ----------------- Start of XMLTV output -----------------
2007-07-04 21:31:30.916 New DB connection, total: 3
2007-07-04 21:31:30.918 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: Ludde
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /usr/bin/tv_grab_se_swedb line 174.
2007-07-04 21:31:31.712 ------------------ End of XMLTV output ------------------
Error in 4:1: unexpected end of file

The code for /usr/bin/tv_grab_se_swedb is:

where the erroneous line 174 is the one starting with "count". The variable "channel" was not set as can be seen below.

Lesson learned 1::idea:
It turns out that mythfilldatabase looks for channel information in:
/home/mythtv/.mythtv/SD.xmltv
where "SD" is my name for the source (expecting an "HD" entry soon... ).
My SD.xmltv contained only two lines:

when it should have contained all the channel information too:

Lesson learned 2::idea:
There is also a config file in /home/mythtv/.xmltv/. In my case called tv_grab_se_swedb.conf. This file looked fine and had all the channel information in it, however MythTV doesn't look in it. Copying the channel lines to my /home/mythtv/.mythtv/SD.xmltv and rerunning mythfilldatabase solved the problem.
Lesson learned 3::idea:
Interrupting mythfilldatabase when populating the channel information the first time produces this disastrous result. The file should be checked for channel information if things don't look right. It can easily be added afterwards.

"Disastrous" is a strong word, but I've been without working KnoppMyth for more than a week and have all kinds of symptoms of abstinence.

Obviously, line 174 is very sweden specific, but I figured that the other grabbers work similarly and would also suffer from the lack of channel information?:roll:

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410