I installed R5A12 today, and for the first time, I think that this is getting a little bit too easy

Using bttv (LeadTek WinFast 2000XP) for all of these years, I was used to some fiddling with the modules on each upgrade. Not necessary this time. How do you do it? Did my modules config (card, type entries) carry forward? I'll have to look. I did notice that /etc/modules was back to its clean, former self, without any of the parameters I'd passed it in R5A10. How did you accomplish this?

My upgrade procedure, in a nutshell:
Boot from CD, auto upgrade
change lilo.conf to vga=normal
enable lvm (dm-mod), update fstab
install nvidia
copy over xf86config from the supplied nvidia sample file (Thanks!)
restore directv serial control from backup
done
It can't get much easier, unless you start installing nvidia for me. I'm impressed.

My upgrade timeline:
R4V2 (first install) A nice, stable system
R4V4 (complete reinstall following hardware crash and burn) less stable
upgrade to 0.16 debs - frequent crashes. No MythWeather, wife pissed
R5A10 - horrendous, crashing problems. No reliability. Wife threatens to buy TiVo
R5A12 - put in the disk and walk away. Everything seems to be working perfectly now.

I'm stress testing it by recording, watching, changing settings, transcoding, and commercial flagging concurrently. While pounding on MythWeb and ssh from a remote computer. It's holding up well. It may yet pass the "five year old at the keyboard" test. The wife should be pleased.

Congrats, guys, on a job well done.

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R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

By sheer concidence, just subjected the new install to the "five-year-old-find-the-keyboard test" - and we passed. He's now happily watching "The Backyardigans: Pirate Treasure" for the fourth time this week. Lord help me if I'd lost that recording in the upgrade...

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R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv

My 4 year old is hooked on the Backyardigans too.

I'm downloading R5A12 right now.

Is this still built on Myth .17 or did they do a recent cvs pull to pickup some of the fixes?

0.17. There are currently no plans for a (public) release of KnoppMyth with a CVS release of MythTV.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Is there anyway to get the scripts/package specs that you use to build your deb's including your settings.pro so i can setup a system to do nightly builds for us "bleeding edge" folks?

The diffs are in /usr/src/mythtv/sources. Get the cvs, patch w/ the diff, update the control file and build the deb (dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b).

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

So, being dense, I thought I'd confirm this before I started whacking on this on my production box. bshroyer, you were running LVM prior to doing your upgrade? Also, I noticed that you have your LVM volume mapped to /myth/tv. Will I see any problems given that I have it mapped to /myth? I'm guessing no because the Auto Upgrade doesn't touch /myth...

Thanks

not to beat this up to much. Upgrading to R12 has been the most unstable for me in a long time. I have been so busy lately, I have not had much time, and with the forums being down I almost went out and bought a Tivo (ok not really.

I hope to post some issues for help soon, once I check a few things, that I can remember. But we now have to keep a ir keyboard close by because the front end keeps dying. All the damn time, and onle since the from R10. Back end has been rock solid though. Crazy.. O well..

Yup, I was using LVM prior to upgrade. You won't see any problems mapping it to /myth, as the auto upgrade doesn't repartition anything, and only touches hda1 (/) hda2 (swap) and hda3(/cache). I'm guessing when you initially set up your system, you told the installer to give /hda4 (/myth, by default) a small allocation, as it's not used once you map your LV to /myth. Otherwise, any space you've got allocated to /hda4 will be wasted...

Sorry, I'm rambling.



Ditto. I know, I know, I sang the praises of R12 at the start of the thread, but in the end, I had to give it up. After two days, I was having really weird kernel-level lockups. I was getting segfaults in commflag. Frontend died on me all of the time.

In the end, I downgraded to R4V5, using auto upgrade (hehe). I was surprised that it worked in the end, as the database schemas are a bit different between 0.17 and 0.16. Anyhoo, my mythbox has been up now for six days, not one freeze, not one frontend death. I'll let R5 mature a bit more, I think.

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R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv

Thanks for the confirmation. Shortly after posting I found the LVM upgrade howto on the Wiki. DOH!

Given the current issues folks are seeing maybe I'll put A12 on my NON-production box and see how it runs before committing to it...

thx

R5A12 has been very stable for me. I had minor teething pains with firewire being set up as eth0, getting lirc started, clock creep, and the like, but operationally it's been pretty solid. No more frontend lock ups when it wants to record while i'm watching something else, ... I'd say all the problems that have shown up have either been rather minor glitches, or beyond the control of the developers, considering the theorectical alpha status...

I had really strange errors with R5A12. For example, about every fourth boot (and I rebooted that many times a day, in the end) all of the serial ports went away. the "recordedmarkup" table was continuously crashing. mythcommflag refused to run without segfaulting.

I think that my problems with R5A12 were one of the following:

-My hardware (mobo) just isn't compatible. [seems unlikely]
-I've got defective hardware (e.g. RAM), and 2.4.25 is more fault-tolerant than 2.6.9
-My R5A12 ISO was corrupt (I never did check the image)
-After installation, some key inodes went missing due to filesystem errors, so the kernel couldn't properly load.

I'll try it again, once we're past R5A12. The release has bad mojo with me. I know that the problems I was experiencing can't be indicative - they were too severe to warrant a usable release. On top of that, the system was beautiful for two days. On the third day, it was like the machine was possessed. If I see the same issues with R5A13 (please, no 13!) then I'll know it's my hardware, and relegate myself to R4 for the rest of my life

On the plus side, due to my problems with that install, I now know how to do a LOT of hardware diagnostics in Debian

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R5Fxx

Home-Brewed Mythic Dragon Clone
200GB WD IDE /myth
2x250GB WD IDE (lvm) /myth/tv

Not necessarily more tolerant, but it will have a different memory footprint and may have some critical code/data that now maps to the faulty section of memory (or causes the access sequence that reveals the memory fault when accessing it).

I ran my box with R4V5 for a long time with faulty memory, but I found that it would usually only crash or hang when in the watch recordings menu with the little preview screen running. This looked for all the world to me like a myth bug (but I now know better). I fixed it not by replacing memory, but by changing the memory timing settings in the bios. memtest is your friend when troubleshooting this sort of problem.


Quite possible if downloaded on a box with bad memory. I think I had this very problem with the R4V5 iso i downloaded (on my box with bad memory timings). I would get cloop errors when it was installing, but I dont know if the memory did this or if it was a bad iso.