We had a power failure this morning, and I got to wondering, what type of maintenance you need to do on a Knoppmyth installation.

In particular, file systems and database. Do you regularly need to do a cleanup of the filesystems, or does Knoppmyth schedule fsck every so often? Same for the mysql database. How does Knoppmyth handle the inevitable crashed tables etc?

Related to this, when I use the Knoppmyth Backup item on the frontend gui, how many historial backups does it keep.? More than one? If the current setup has a problem I am not aware of, and I do a backup, does it just overwrite the old (good) backup with the new (faulty) one, and if so, should I schedule a job to transfer the backups somewhere else, and keep an archive?

I've said this before and I'll say it again.

A MythTV box is a server. Servers really aren't all that useful if they're not reliable. A reliable server needs reliable power. This means a UPS of some kind. A UPS adequate to bridge >99% of the issues a small "headless" box like this is going to experience can be had for under $60 US, and under $40 if you catch a sale. This is what is known as "a bargain" and "cheap insurance".

If you don't have one already, it's past time to pick one up.

You really missed my point. I understand about a UPS, but it's really a separate issue. What happens when something crashes? What happens when the wife presses the reset button?

Despite the best power conditioning, there is still a question to be asked about maintenance of a server. I help manage quite a few large ones running all manner of systems and databases at work, and there'll all on a very large duplicated UPS system.

However, if you just leave a server sit and never check up on it, do a little housekeeping etc, you are asking for a disaster.

And what about the backups. You need to do regular backups, and keep a rotating cyle, with archived backup sets, if you really don't want to lose valuable data and setup.

So, can anyone say what the situation is with Knoppmyth?

No i understood your point, and while it's a valid one, the first step is still prevention. The most common way that we've seen people muck up their databases and file systems is power glitches. Until you fix that 90% of the problem any other improvements you make are marginal, like optimizing a bad algorithm...

Ok fair enough, sorry.

btw: how do Tivo's handle this. I'm sure many Tivo users just plug their device into the wall socket.

For that matter, what about all the hard drive PVRs starting to hit the market these days?

For the most part, I do no maintenance.

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When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I really don't worry about it much. It's only a bunch of TV shows, after all. Now that I know (kind of) what I'm doing, I could reinstall KnoppMyth from scratch pretty handily. I have 800G of disk space on three drives. No way I'm going to back up those disks!

One thing you CAN do is make estra sure your disks are nice and cool. I've lost several disks to heat-related premature failure, including two in my hacked Tivo. I finally hardwired the Tivo fan to run all the time to get my disk to a reasonable temp. My KnoppMyth box has a good arrangement of fans and the drives get good cooling.

Like someone said... "prevention" is the right idea!

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My mythbox is the only one in the house on UPS. I mean, really, I don't want the system to miss recording a show just because of a power outage.

The only thing I have ever done with maintenance is to delete the logs and the ringbuffer files.

The log issue has caused me so much grief that on my next build, I'm going to create a separate log partition so mythbackend can go to town and fill up that small partition all it wants without filling up my root partition and causing other file corruptions.

By the way, Tivos were designed from the start as a consumer electronics device. They expect people to unplug the power on the units while it is busy doing things, and they expect it to recover gracefully. My tivo didn't even have a power button to turn it off.

-Aubrey

Hi,

The only maintence I do to my system is monitor the results of mythlink.sh. Over time things may get mis-linked and you end up with some deadwood cluttering your /myth/tv or files that you can't delete because things get out of sync a little.

check here for more information.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 9220dc825b

I have recovered over a hundred gig of lost space using that mythlink.sh mainly because you don't know what is lost. You have to fix the script in A22 to use it as it got damaged along the way.

Mike

Thanks Mike. That's exactly the sort of stuff I was hoping might exist for Knoppmyth. I read that other thread, and I think I understand what it does. Sounds very useful, especially as I often play the nuv files on my desktop machine, directly from an nfs drive I have mapped to the Knoppmyth machine. Being able to use 'pretty' names would be very useful.

What I am not sure of, is where mythlink.sh stands in R5A22. I see that the script is there, but don't see any schedule in the crontab for either root nor mythtv. Also, as you said, it doesn't work, lot's of errors, when run (as root).

Is there a newer version I can download? If not, what needs to be fixed (if that's not too long and complicated to explain)?

Should it have been setup in a crontab file as part of the install?

/etc/cron.hourly/pretty runs it, but it is indeed broken. There's a mythlink.sh.orig in the same place as mythlink.sh which works ok.

That worked well. Links all created in /myth/pretty

Strangest thing (and this is my lack of knowledge with linux) but I can't open them from my other box. Is it perhaps that links won't work on NFS drives, or perhaps that Xine and gmplayer etc, won't run media files via a link?