Thursday night I reverted back to r5a12 after an upgrade didn't go smoothly.

Since then it's been working fine. Just now I powered off the machine (possibly first time since thurs night) to swap cdrom drives. Now mythbackend won't start from the init script. If I run:

it works fine. But starting it from the init script:

causes the backend not to run. log entries complain about not being able to read mysql.txt and not being able to create ~/.mythtv. I restore my home directory, preseving permissions so everything should be fine there. just to be sure I checked the permissions and both ~/.mythv/ and mysql.txt are owned by mythtv:mythtv and are world readable.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

did you happen to create a user called mythtv for the regular user? the instructions specifically tell you not to do this.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Actually, I didn't. I noticed some others were having similar problems due to that. When I first set up myth on Ubuntu, i learned the hard way.

Not so with knoppmyth. I let it do all the magic.
passwd:


(yes I know i posted the password hash for mythtv. really, don't bother running john against it.)

anything else to check for?

Are you remembering to run it with a "su - mythtv ..." wrapper so it doesn't try running as root?

well when running it from init.d it shouldn't require the su mythtv, though I suppose it's possible he ran it for the first time as root, and it created some file that subsiquently are not editable by mythtv when it gets run from init.d

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

I had the same problem sometime ago...
It's simple, just put this line in the mythbackend init.d script (in the top):
HOME=/home/mythtv

In this way, it found .mythtv/mysql.txt it search...

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Sito italiano sull'HTPC e MythTV. www.htpcpoint.it

Thanks for the tips.


When I run the init script from init.d, i run it as root, but the init script transitions to the mythtv user before running mythtbackend.


I'll give this a try. wonder why $HOME isn't already defined?
Strange that before I reinstalled, I didn't have to do this.

Thanks again, and I'll give this a try.

I've been experimenting. When I used sudo to start the myth-backend init script, it runs fine. This is because using sudo the script is run within your own shell but with su priviledges, so it get $HOME from your environment. However when the script is run by init (as root) at bootup or when I su then run it, $HOME = /root, so clearly it can't read $HOME/.mythtv/mysql.txt.

Here's what I don't get. The start-stop-daemon program that starts the mythbackend changes to the mythtv user when running /usr/bin/mythbackend. How is it supposed to get $HOME from the mythtv user's environment, and why isn't it?

One other thing I can think of that may be related is ownerships of any of the files under /etc. When I restored my /etc/ directory, I screwed up preserving some of the ownerships, so to fix things I chowned root:root everything under etc. Was I wrong in doing this? Does any one know of anything that should be owned by some other user? To check run the following command:

which finds anything under /etc that is owned by a user or group other than root.

I appreciate any input or suggestions on this.

Thanks

Okay sorry to keep replying to my own post.. but I gave r5a16 another try tonight...with success, so the problem is now moot. However any insights to what may have been causing this would still be appreciated. Very perplexing, indeed.