Lastest verion of KnoppMyth, running fine for 7 days straight, I finished watching a recorded show and then all my recordinds disappear... I check my tables to see if they were corrupted.. None were corrupted, "MYTH_PROTO_VERSION 26" errors all over the place when accessing mythWeb...

Running:

MB: P4PE800D
ATI Radeon 9700
PVR TV-250
P4 2.8Ghz
512MB Corsair XMS

I notice there are plenty of ways to mess up MythTV just by doing simple tasks within it... Is it safe to say that MythTV is not stable enough to run for the long term on most systems?

Errr... That would be, "What is 'NO'?" Alex.

My production box gets a lot of abuse, experimental updates, trying the latest ivtv and nvidia drivers, testing walk throughs for people, a moderately heavy recording schedule, ... Basically more than any 3 average users are likely to manage, and despite all that I can't tell you the last time it really went toes up on me. Even more so lately with my test box dragooned into other service while I waited for parts to fix my workstation. Every script, example command, upgrade, patch, ... that I post (unless I call out that it's utterly untested) gets tested/run on that box.

I currently know of two ways to crash the front end, both of which are easy enough to avoid. Other than that the box just plain works, day in, day out, all day, all night.

What he said...

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Thank you cesman and tjc for the quick replies, I'll have to wait to see how many other people share the same experiences. Of course with the amount of posts from people having problems, it's hard to tell how many people are not having problems because they wouldn't need to post!

On the flipside people with no issues aren't posting much at all (well, except in teir 1) so it's hard to get a ratio. Also there are those who give up and leave.

It's not unusual for the frontend to crash on me when it's starting up. Sometimes when I run it again I'll get a segmentation error other times it'll work. Every now and then the desktop won't come up. A quick reboot or two work to fix the problem.

I know I can completely lock up the system but that's a hardware issue with my wireless card. I've seen a few rare crashes on shutdown. I end up with a prompt that I can't input anything but I can switch between terminals with the ALT-F*

A couple times things have gotten corrupted (no more boot) when I installed something with apt-get. I try and avoid that when I can. I avoid that program if I can. It was early in my install so I just used the CD to blow everything away and start anew.

My computer consumes about 80+ watts when its running so I prefer not to leave it up constantly so I can't comment on long term stability. But for the most part, I've noticed things are generally rather stable.

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Skill level: 10^-3

My boxes (a mbe/fe combo and a fe only) routinely have uptimes measured in weeks and months. I do seem to have an issue with the 7xxx series nvidia drivers and my generic mx440 video cards that occasionally cause issues, but I've upgraded to an 8xxx series driver which will hopefully solve that. When I was running R5A15.2 and a 6xxx series nvidia driver, the only time I had to reboot was when I did something that needed it.

Bottom line - fir me, knoppmyth is as stable as any other linux machine in the house - and far more reliable than any of the windows boxes...

Allan

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Running Knoppmyth R5F27 since 09/12/07

Hardware Specs

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

We traded apartments with a couple in another country for 2 weeks. The couple staying
at our place have no Linux experience and have never heard of mythtv. I gave no
instructions on how use the system. I can tell from the logs that they use it every day. It has
not crashed nor have they even accidentally exited from from the frontend, it has been 10
days so far.

What this tells me is that with the right hardware and a Knoppmyth install that essentially
guarantees that -- kernel / drivers / firmware / mythtv -- etc. all mesh
nicely, that you can get a rock solid system.

What this experience also tells me is that the mythtv interface is intuitive and easy to use.

The view that one gets from looking at the forum is distorted because most of the posters
are people with problems. I ran into more than my fair share of issues getting the system
stable, but with me it was because:

1) I don't follow instructions
2) I am using a US NTSC PVR-350 in a PAL country
3) I don't rely on microsoft for anything, so all my hardware is fairly old.
--- As linux runs well on just about anything.
4) I have the wonderful ability to attract obscure bugs.

A great thing about OSS is that it exists, grows and thrives based solely
on how useful it for people and its not affected by proclamations and white
papers.

I think this is definitely true. I was amazed to hear from cesman once that there were over 10000 downloads from the torrent alone for one of the recently released versions. What this suggests to me is that there are lots of people out there whose systems are more or less rock solid.

I have had a variety of challenges during my various setups but once set up my system has been fairly stable. My 10 year old and 13 year old use it regularly without complaint. I go weeks between reboots most of those due to me messing with something.

Craig

In all honesty, I have to admit that R5B7 has been a lot less stable for me than R5A22 was:

Random mysql database corruption, usually resulting in 127 errors on mythweb. Sometimes just the tv listings are affected, sometimes the recorded programs, sometimes everything. Sometimes these are solved by just restarting mysqld, other times I have to manually repair the tables.

More unexplained frontend crashes while watching livetv (and not just from the chromakey osd, which I know is experimental and don't expect to work).

Frequent livetv freezes, where the video output just stops on one frame unexpectedly.

I still love Knoppmyth and wouldn't trade it for any other pvr, and hope to figure out some of these problems soon. My good experiences with it still far outweigh my bad.

I read the form most days but rarely post. After a bit of tweaking the thing just works. My Mythbox is usually on for a few days and off for a few. I can't even remember the last time it crashed. Wish I could says that for my XP box.

miker
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