I'm getting lockups after about 24-48 hours after booting my myth box with R5F27.

Everything works fine after I reboot, but I need to find the source of these crashes because its causing us to miss shows and the WAF (wife acceptance factor) is taking a hit.

I am at a loss of where to look, (what logs I should check, potential causes to look into, etc.) so I could really use some tips of what to check. It's tough because everything works right after I boot.

Look for obvious things, like blocked cooling vents, etc. I had my KM box go down awhile ago, and it turned out it was because the CPU fan wasn't working properly.

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I've actually noticed these problems too. I did an upgrade install from R5F1 (which would stay up for weeks at a time) and now it seems to freeze up about every other day or so. I don't believe it to be an overheating problem, due to the fact that the hardware is the same as when I had R5F1.

My hardware is as follows:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (venice)
MSI K8MM-v Motherboard (via chip based)
PVR-500
PVR-250
Chaintech av710
IDE Hard drive

I imagine the first step to finding the problem would be to check the log files, but I'm not sure which ones would be best to look at, so any direction would be welcome.

check messages & syslog in /var/log

Hi There, I am also having lockups. I was able to get into the machine during one of these lockup and noticed that I had a Zombie process when I used the TOP command. I ended up restarting the mythtv-backend and ran TOP again. The zombie process went away and I had control of my front end again.

I think I did see a script to restart the backend in a failure, I am going to try that.

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Backend/Frontend
ASUS M4A78-EM w/8400GS 4G RAM pcHDTV 3000 + PVR500 (1045), 1TB, 250 & 320. Iguana IR USB (running R6)
Frontend_1
Asus M2NPV-VM - 1GB RAM - 40 GB Hard Disk - StreamZap
Frontend_2
Dragon 1.0 w/ 2G RAM - 40 GB Hard Disk StreamZap

I am having what appears to be this same issue.

about every 24 - 48 hours I lockup.

R5F27 -- Fresh auto-install. PVR-350 tvout, 6100SM-M mb.

When it locks up I am unable to switch to a VC to see what is going on, (kbd caps-lock and num-lock also don't make the led for each light up on kbd. --)
It no longer responds to pings and can't reach it via ethernet. Ctl-Alt-Del and Ctl-Alt-Backspace also have no effect.

/var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog, /var/log/debug, /var/log/daemon.log, /var/log/Xorg-0.log

etc.. Are not giving me any clues. -- there are no entries from lockup timeframe.

I am going setup a perl script to dump a "ps auxwww" every hour to file, so maybe after the next lockup I will have something to work from.

I've checked my logs as well and there is no entry at the time of the lockup except the one for the reboot.

by the way mac, nice to know there are other users in the area (I live in Arlington)

What seemed to do the trick for me, was that my network drivers seemed to be crashing after a day or two. I found this in the daemon.log and from looking at the netgraphs from the RRDtool in MythWeb.

As a hack, I just have my network card reinitialize every couple of hours, and that did the trick. Though the right fix would be to update the drivers to the one that supports this linux kernel.

My advice is try to determine the time of the crash from the RRDtool, and look for ANYTHING written in the logs right before it went down. That's what did it for me. Sorry, it can't help you, mac.

Hey, I grew up in Fairfax, and went to school in Alexandria. No longer there though.

I don't want to speak to soon, but I think adding a cron job to restart the front and backends every morning has cleared up the problem.. I will post back if it continues.

All is good again by restarting my fe/be daily.


0 2 * * * root /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend restart ; sleep 5 ; killall -v Xorg

My box just had some issues..

This time it was not locked so I was able to get a look around before rebooting.

It was just giving me black screen when trying to watch live-tv or recordings..

This showed up in the logs at the time of the issues:

backend log:
2007-09-26 10:03:14.422 MPEGRec(/dev/video0) Error: select timeout - ivtv driver has stopped responding

syslog:
Sep 26 10:04:03 mythtv kernel: ivtv0: All encoder VBI stream buffers are full. Dropping data.
Sep 26 10:04:03 mythtv kernel: ivtv0: Cause: the application is not reading fast enough.

[.........................................]

Found this:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/ivtv/devel/33976

Have not had the time to poke around more.

Thinking about going up to kernel 2.6.23 to see if the ivtv changes are included, kernel upgrade is a bit of a timesink.

It looks like you all may be running multiple disk drives and/or multiple cards. It might help to strip out some hardware to get a base machine and see if the problems go away? I run 1 HDD and 2 pvr 250's and dont have any issues at all on R5F27.
With all that hardware maybe it is getting hot as previously suggested? Or failing/underpowered power supplies?

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ASUS A7N266 Micro-ATX Motherboard
Athlon 2200 processor
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2 PVR250's w/remote
eVGA e-GeForce mx4000 (64 Ram with Tv/Out (Svideo))
Lite-on DVD cd-rw combo
120 GB Western Digital

I've had great success with adding the no apic line to my lilo config. Since doing that the machine hasn't locked up or spontaneously rebooted, so I recommend trying that to anyone that hasn't already.

thanks for the tip jigawho, I will give it a shot!