This problem sounds very familiar to me but I couldn't remember the answer, nor could I come up with a good selection of search terms that would reveal the answer to me.

I recently auto-upgraded my R5B7 to R5C7. I can run mythfilldatabase manually as the mythtv user and that works fine. However if left on its own, it will not run. For instance my backend status page currently says:



That "suggested next" time has passed and it didn't run. The "successful" run from yesterday was one I fired off manually.

I checked and the MythTV preference for having it control the mythfilldatabase run was on and seemed to be configured correctly.

I would check a log, but since it's not running I'm thinking there'd be nothing in a log to check.

What am I missing? Thanks.

I suspect you need a wrapper script, because your local guide fetcher has a bug that requires some enviroment variable to be set. http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8199

tjc: as always, thanks for the post.

I read the thread and created a script called "wrapperscript.sh"



I chmod +x ed the file and put it in /usr/local/bin/ . It looks as it should:



I set that file to run in the appropriate MythTV config screen. And... it didn't run when it was supposed to. If I run wrapperscript.sh manually, mythfilldatabase runs and the MythWeb status page reports a successful run. So basically I've got the same problem, now once removed.

Any other ideas? Thanks.

Please do investigate the log to see if it say anything at all.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

ceenvee703 - I was thinking that you're in the ANZ part of the world, but something you said in another thread now makes me thing that you're in NA using zap2it. If that's the case you shouldn't be having this problem.

Are you providing the full path to the command in the setup page?

Nope, I'm in northern VA, USA. Full path is being provided. And a check of /var/log/mythtv/ logs show nothing obvious when it was supposed to run, but does show activity when I run it manually.

I found one other thing, an old fix, via Google. I'm trying it and will know if it works tomorrow...

Now that you say that I recognize the NoVa 703 area code from my time in 301/410.

BTW - This might be one of those rare settings that you need to restart the backend for it to take effect. There aren't very many, so it's easy to forget that they exist. It also might not hurt to throw a wrapper back around there and add some extra logging to see if the job is getting triggered at all.

OK, today's scheduled time has come and gone, no go on the auto-run. I tried this fix prior to that point with no luck (it involved updating the "lastrun" setting in a mythconverg table)

http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv- ... 47661.html

I did reboot, but I didn't try the wrapper script, as I was hoping that it wasn't needed. I'll try the wrapper script and rebooting and see if that does it.

One thing I did notice when running mythfilldatabase manually (as user mythtv) is the following:



Hm, I'm also noticing that in the table "housekeeping" that "MythFillDB" is not being updated with the right "lastrun" value. Well, I'll use some of that info and check some more.

ceenvee703, have you had any luck with this problem? I've been having the same thing happen since I upgraded a couple months back. Along with the wrapper, I dug up something about possibly updating XMLTV that sounded close -- the update didn't do anything on my end, though.

I haven't taken the time to really tear through the system to figure it out yet, as I have some new hardware on order anyway. The frontend segfaults every week or two on me, so I just take the opportunity to fill back up the database before restarting it (I know I should trace why it's crashing, and I started to... but this box has been running for the last year and a half, so if it continues after the new parts arrive, I'll dig deeper).

You're the first person I've seen who's listing the *exact* same problem that I seem to be having with the database fill though.

Charlie

Nope, no luck yet. I've posted to the mythtv-user mailing list but so far haven't gotten any leads there either. I will certainly post back to this thread if I figure out what's going on.

That "mythfillperiod" message I referred to goes away when I set the "number of days between mythfilldatabase runs" to 2 in the Setup page, but changing the number of days did not help anything other than that. And I did try setting the wrapper back in there and then rebooting; it didn't run.

Everything I've come across is only partially relevant, but nothing has seemed to have worked here either. Yours was an upgrade, correct? Mine was a fresh install (minus the database and the /video partition, of course), so it's not limited to upgrades.

I didn't find changing the period from 'recommended' to a set time helped either. Nor did specifying the specific path to mythfilldatabase, or piping to a log file (since it doesn't even attempt to run).

Perhaps we have some common hardware? My Mythbox is running:

Athlon XP 2600+ Processor
A7V-600 Motherboard
512MB PC3200 DDR RAM
Seagate ST3300831A 300GB Hard Drive
Geforce4 MX440 Video Card
PVR-250 Tuner Card
Soundblaster Live!
Liteon 16x dual layer DVD-RW drive
Sitting inside an Antec Overture case

This setup has been running well for ... quite a while. I've had a few heat issues this summer (hence the new parts; the original Overture case gets a little stuffy, and I don't like the proc hitting 90C+ on a hot day... neither does it, actually ), how about yourself?

Charlie

Well, mine is definitely stable. I would say that it never crashes but that would be a huge jinx. So just forget I said that.

Mine also doesn't get very hot. It's in a Silverstone home theater case. It usually reports around 38 deg C unless it's transcoding or commercial-seeking, and then I don't think I've seen it above 70 deg C

I've got an Athlon 2400+ on a Chaintech 7NIF2 mobo. Two drives LVMd together, 512MB RAM like you, some GeForce card (don't remember which), an external USB device for doing digital audio out.

My backend is occasionally prone to the accelerating time thing that's been documented here and on the wiki, although currently (and since the upgrade) it has not been a problem. And when it has been a problem, it hasn't affected mythfilldatabase's running, AFAIK.

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... 2TimeDrift

In all honesty, the heat problem has only surfaced since I moved into the new house; no AC and the unit is on the main floor instead of in the basement, where my livingroom was before. The heat is really just a convenient excuse for me to buy new parts, really...

I also didn't mean to imply my box was unstable; the frontend crashes every couple weeks yes, but I've never had the backend go down. My previous install hadn't been rebooted in a year, and this one has been going dandy since I re-installed.

I really didn't think it would be a hardware issue, but our systems kind of confirm that -- our boxes are very, very different beasts.

Charlie

I've posted to mythtv-user mailing list about this and haven't gotten any useful replies. So now I'm thinking I should take a different tack.

I know I could set up a cron job to run it at a random time every day to avoid Zap2It overload, but it would be nice to use the Zap2It "NextSuggestedTime" and run it at that time. Is there something I could use to do so? I'm thinking I'd have to make some kind of script to pull the date/time out of mythconverg, and then send that along to some kind of utility program. Or should I just forget about the suggested time and set up the cron job and hope that the next KnoppMyth upgrade fixes the problem somehow?

I've been having the exact same problem as ceenvee703 described. Mine was also an upgrade. I can run mythfilldatabase perfectly fine from a terminal (often putty) but it never runs on the "suggested next run".

I'm in Indiana.