I truly don't know what the issue is with your setup... Can you post the output of:

BTW: It shouldn't matter what you call you frontend. You should note that what you cann your system is how Myth saves the config for that system in the DB. I really wouldn't recommend calling one's FE the same as one's M or SBE.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Sure:



So clearly the MBE networking should be getting enabled. And remember, if I tail -f /var/log/mysql/mysql.log on the MBE, I can see it spit out 100 lines or so every time I bring up the FE on the other machine, and the FE doesn't complain about being unable to talk to the database -until- I either try to go to Watch TV, or quit. It's fine on startup. So I really think it's talking to the database at least -sometimes-; just not -every- time. (Or it's getting back something it doesn't understand and is emitting the wrong error message, e.g., "can't talk" as opposed to "got back something I couldn't cope with".)



Okay, then I won't; that seems risky to me as well, I assume, however, that it -is- still okay to use an FE as an SBE? E.g., I'll have my MBE with most of the tuners, and put the 350 in a different machine, using the 350's TV-out as my FE, and also using the 350's tuner as an SBE. [Note that I haven't actually -done- this yet, since I'm still trying to get an FE to just act as an FE without complicating matters with NFS and symlinks and trying to get it to also be an SBE, at least until my FE claims it can talk to the MBE.] But note that making my FE also be an SBE seems, by definition, to mean that they must share a name, because it's the same machine and hence the same IP address. I'm doing this because of limitations in the number of available PCI slots in each machine, I simply cannot put all the tuners in the same machine. And of course the MythTV doc seems to indicate that any combination should work and this should scale to virtually any size, so I'm assuming that two machines should work...

Tnx.

P.S. Where is the code, manifests, etc etc that would be required to reproduce the A22 ISO? I'd like to start seeing if I can spot a bug (though I'm not familiar with the codebase at all yet), but it's not obvious to me where this code is available. For the meantime, I may actually go through the effort of installing A16 to see if I see the same problems there. If I don't, then that will definitely nail it as an A22 bug, at least; it might be worth the 3-4 hours it would take me to install A16 and then (maybe) reinstall A22 again. I may actually install A16 on a spare disk so I have both an A22 and an A16 MBE and can swap them in and out with A16/22 CD-booted FE's.

There is no such thing as an FE with tuners. If you have a tuner, you are a backend. I truly do not see this as a bug. I've tested this before releasing and backward. Not to mention again since the start of this thread. The steps to building the ISO are in my head and for the most part, the same as remastering Knoppix. If your MBE is "seen sometimes" perhaps you should investigate your network?

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Okay, am I misusing terminology here? I'm thinking a "frontend" is anything that's running mythfrontend, or perhaps anything that's showing video to the user. Ignoring the terminology, here's what I want: I want tuners in both machines, and I want to be able to view video using the PVR-350 in one of them. (All the other tuners are 250's, hence no video out.) If that means that I have an MBE and an SBE, and nothing called a "frontend", that's fine, as long as the functionality is there. I -think- that MythTV supports this functionality; am I wrong? I don't even much care which machine is the MBE and this is the SBE; right now, I'd like the 350's tuner used -last-, and some bit of documentation somewhere advised that this means that the machine it's in be the SBE, since the MBE's tuners will be used first unless some frobbing around with the tuner card configuration is done. But I'm willing to swap the roles of the two machines if it's the only way to get things to work.

For testing purposes, I'm trying to see if I can get a FE (ignoring the fact that its 350 also has a tuner) to talk to the backend, since that's presumably the first step in transforming a FE into an SBE. Is that the right way to go about this? Is the problem that I've been assigning the 350's tuner to a video source while configuring the frontend? (Seems unlikely.)



Hmm. So there are no scripts of your own that are running during the installation? It's all coming from other peoples' code? If so, a manifest of exactly which versions got rolled into the A22 ISO would be really helpful; then I could pull all the relevant bits and pieces from others' repositories and try to figure out what might be going on. (I suppose I could try to figure out the version and origin of everything that runs during installation, but that seems like a lot of work.) I've never remastered Knoppix, so I'd be starting from ground zero here, and I'm hoping to avoid that, but who knows...



That seems vanishingly unlikely, given that (a) the behavior is absolutely, 100% repeatable, and (b) I have never seen a hint of network trouble anywhere else. I've just got the two boxes talking to each other through a normal hub. If the hub was somehow mangling traffic, TCP would die or get extremely slow. It's not. When I start mythfrontend, the backend -instantly- shows me 100 queries in its log (I'm wondering if it's configured not to show more per group; I recall some value like that in the configuration), and when I try to do Watch TV on the frontend (or kill off mythfrontend there), I -instantly- get a "can't talk to the backend" error on the frontend. None of this looks like "flaky network" to me. [Oh, and I also get mythfrontend complaining that it's trying to open connections via loopback if I run it with "-v all", as we've seen in my logs---presumably, -that- is the real bug here, but what I can't figure out is why it's insisting on using loopback when all the configuration files we've been investigating, and all of the menus we've seen, specify 192.168.0.20, e.g., the MBE, and not the loopback interface.]

Right now, while I think about installing R5A15.1 on a fresh disk as another MBE test (not A16 only because I happen to have 15.1 sitting around on a CD and not A16), I'm running a grep on the FE machine for all files that mention "127.0.0.1" or "loopback". Maybe something will jump out at me. Here's hoping, anyway...

If we are going to talk, then I'd appreciate it if you used the proper terminalogy. It doesn't matter if the 350 is in your master or slave backend, just define it last when you set up your tuners.

Really at this point, I think you should start all over. Check the MD5Sum of the ISO and burn at a low speed. Do a clean install on your intended master-backend. Configure it as prescribed here. On another system, boot the CD and use it as a frontend. Report back.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

In case it's not obvious, I'm not sure what the proper terminology -is-. Apparently, a "frontend" is a thing without tuners, but a "backend" can show video if it happens to be running mythfrontend. Is that correct?



I'm unclear on how to do this. I presume that you mean, "run mythtv-setup on the machine that has the 350 in it -last-; run mythtv-setup on the machine with the 250's in it -first-." That would imply that the 350 -must- be in an SBE, because the MBE must be set up first before the SBE can be set up. Right? That's certainly how I've been operating so far...



That's my current state. Just for yucks, I ran md5sum on /dev/hdc on the FE machine, using the CDROM drive I've been using to boot the FE machine from; its MD5 matches that on the website. I'd expect this, since I verified the MD5 on the ISO in the filesystem, then did "cmp the-iso /dev/hdc" after I finished burning the CD, but it can't hurt to make sure that the CD still has all of its bits and that the drive it's currently mounted in can read them. It can.

The backend I've currently got running -is- a clean install. The one change I made to it was described in a post a while back; I changed DBHostName=localhost to DBHostName=192.168.0.20 [its own address] after several failures getting the FE to connect. No change in behavior. I could revert that file, if necessary, since I made a backup copy. And yes, I booted the BE after I changed it.

Note that when I built the backend, I told it its correct IP addresses during the configuration; I did -not- let them default to 127.0.0.1 and then run mythtv-setup and change them later. If I run mythtv-setup on the BE right now, it shows the correct .20 addresses. [If it's the case that this whole process fails unless I run the BE's mythtv-setup w/127's at first, then change them later, then no, I didn't do that---but I'd be really, really stunned if it was required to do that. Is that how you configure, or do you set the correct address on the BE the very first time that the installer shows you the page w/the pair of IP's on it?]

The FE I've got running is booted from the CD. I've tried a couple of experiments since: In particular, I tried allowing it to use DHCP to configure itself, instead of hardwiring in the .21 of the BE. No change. I also tried booting an A15.1 CD ('cause I had it around) and running the FE from that. No change. (So it isn't the FE version, it seems.) I have -not- tried reinstalling the BE from that A15.1 CD, btw; it's still running the A22 whose installation notes I wrote down several posts above.

Other interesting datapoints: I tried running mythtv-setup on the FE and looking at its video sources. It has one listed called "Zap", which is what I called the Zap2It source on my backend. I didn't type that into the FE. So it's pretty clear that the FE was able to talk to the BE enough to grab that information from it, so the two -are- in communication. Yet it's also getting these "can't talk" errors when I do Watch TV, and it's logging connection attempts (in my shell on the FE) to localhost (not .20) if I run mythfrontend -v all. [Note that I haven't tried to configure any cards, video sources, or inputs on the FE at all; I did that the very first time (2 days ago?) i was trying this, when I was installing to disk on the FE instead of just booting it from the CD, but for the moment, I'm assuming that not configuring any of that will cause the FE to ignore the 350 in it and talk to one of the tuners in the BE, then try to render video in my X window, if i say Watch TV.]

While poking around, I came across the instructions on http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO ... perm_mysql about making sure the SQL database available to multiple machines. I think this is already done, though:



[I've removed the same 16-digit hex constant in all 3 outputs, since I have no idea what password it's representing and would rather not take the chance; that's what the "hex-digits" are above.] I don't know if the "mythtv" mentioned there is a username (as in a UNIX username) or something configured in one of the config files (c.f. somebody's comments about the FE being called mythfe1 not working, but mythtv working; maybe this is a clue? Or a red herring; I have no idea.)

Can you please post complete copies (and pathnames!) of your my.cnf, mysql.txt, and (why not) the database dump that somebody mentioned earlier on in this thread and that I emulated? And can you try just running mysql as root on your FE and see if it gave the error mine gave me? So far in this thread, you are the -only- person who has claimed that everything works; everybody else who's chimed in has reported either that they can't watch TV, or they can't watch recordings. So I think your configuration files would be singularly valuable in determining what's going on here.

Thanks!

I truly don't like repeating myself... I truly don't like it when I give someone specific instructions and they go off on thier own.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I just told you that I did a complete, clean install on the MBE. I could do it AGAIN, but what would it prove? I posted everything I did, in great detail. If there is nothing you can see that's wrong about what I did, how would doing ANOTHER clean install of the MBE help? It's now been reinstalled about 5 times. Why would try number 6 change anything if I do it exactly as I did the previous one?

If you can find anything in my notes that I did wrong, or that I should do differently, I'll do another MBE reinstall. But failing that, there will be NO difference between my reinstall of 6 hours ago, and a reinstall of right now. Right? Maybe if somebody -else- did a reinstall, it might help, because they'll probably do -something- differently, and it might work.

And you -still- haven't posted any config files; all you've done is continue to say "it works for me" and to treat anyone for whom it -doesn't- work as if they must not be able to follow instructions. Yet everyone else who's said anything has said that something is broken for them, in different ways. Either people who have working solutions aren't reading this thread or aren't bothering to post (a pity, but understandable), or something -isn't- working---except for you.

I gave you specific details on what I wanted you to do. No where did I state edit mysql.txt. I've already stated that LinHES works for me. My files are in the LinHES doc. Other than you and 2 other users, no one else has stated they have a problem.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

IT IS WORKING NOW. I got my remote front end working! On my earlier post, I put the NULL on the wrong setting. I checked again on my friends settings and it was the MasterServerIP that was set to NULL not the BackendServer.
Anyway, I changed the setting for hostname in the database



Now my settings look like this


This fixed my problem. Booting from the CD or running from my frontend only install, it is working great. Some how when I was setting it up, the MasterServerIP must have been set to mythtv instead of being a NULL.

cesman, cecil, and all the others, You guys ROCK! you have done an awesome job with this. Other that my little problem with the frontend, R5A22 is working much better than R5A16 was for me.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Bingo! Thanks bjenx!



This made an -instant- difference; Watch TV now works on my CD-booted FE.

So -NOW- the question is, "What in the world is going on in the installer such that it's mis-setting certain values in the database?"

[I haven't gone back and fixed up the bashed directories in the FE configuration which are trying to save video to /var; I'll just boot the SBE's hard disk instead and see if that works now and/or fix its configuration if the directories are wrong, and then I'll do the NFS stuff & symlinking to make the FE into an SBE instead.]

But it sure looks like there's some sort of odd bug in the installer, somewhere. Going in and frobbing the database like this shouldn't have been necessary.

Oddly enough, I ran into this same problem when setting up an OS X front end:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6572

The last step in that post describes the necessary MySql changes.

I think the newest builds of MythFrontend are neglecting to create certain records in the 'settings' table during first launch. This would only happen to folks running MythFrontend on a machine with no existing records in their MBE settings table. Name a new box "foobar", or whatever, run MythFrontend on it, and it should be repeatable.

What's the best way of bugreporting this upstream?

Odd, I did this during my testing...

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!