Hello all,

I'm a complete linux newbie, but I've managed to get myth up, record tv and sound, and have it running just fine. So far so good!

Kind of

Everything seems to run fine, but at some random point in the day (seems to be the afternoon) my machine completely crashes - hard lock, have to turn the box off. I've not done anything, scheduled anything, at most I have an open SSH session into the box and Myth is sitting on the main menu.

I don't even know where to look unfortunately - the only other bit of info I can throw out is that when I rip a DVD, it only works if I do a straight rip. If I attempt a transcode I can pretty much be sure it will crash during the transcoding process (step 1 or 2) - I've never gotten through a transcoding and have tried about 10 times. I don't know if it's related, but it's something..

One last bit of info - I was trying to use remote shares to a windows box with samba and had music and gallery pointing to those shares. Myth would crash trying to access either gallery or music almost instantly upon going into those areas... I do have large collections of music and pictures, but Myth was no longer even responding to pings during that time. In the end, I just added another drive to my Myth box and moved all the content local. Again, might be related... might not.

My specs:
Gigabyte GA-6VX-4X Motherboard
Celeron 1.2ghz
Almost 400megs of RAM
Hauppage PVR-250
Nvidia GeForce FX5200 64MB
SB Live Platinum
ATA133 PCI Board
DLink Ethernet (DFE-530TX)
A USB2 PCI Board
Disabled onboard IDE, USB, Power Management (as best I could) and just about everything else on the mobo

Running latest KnoppMyth! Let me know if anyone has any ideas - it's such an awesome piece of software, just need to get this to stop crashing and I'm gold.

Thanks!

Here's my /proc/interrupts

root@mythtv:~# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 7052 XT-PIC timer
1: 4 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
9: 20 XT-PIC usb-uhci
10: 8031 XT-PIC ide0, ide1
11: 4028 XT-PIC usb-uhci, EMU10K1, eth0, nvidia
12: 0 XT-PIC ivtv: iTVC15/16 mpg2 encoder chip
NMI: 0
ERR: 0

11 looks suspect to me, but don't know how to fix it.

have you disabled your commercial marking? that killed my system pretty effectively until I managed to upgrade it to 16... couldn't wait until Cesman upgraded the main code base... now mine's stable.

I'll give that a shot right now! I did remove the USB board from my computer to see if that helped as it was crashing every 5 minutes with it in.

speaking of which have they made any improvements in the commercial detection, it's always been just about useless for me.

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

Xsecrets

I know that it flags commercials now without killing my box. Aside from that, I actually haven't tried using auto-commercial skip YET... still feeling things out...

Where I'm currently at is the backend has ran for ~ 3 days (new record for this box) and the front end seems to be more stable now as well - seemed like it would drop from time to time.

Next test is to leave "watching TV" on, and see what happens - normally that would crash after 3-4 hours previously...

Well I left the box running overnight and just checked it, and sure enough it's crashed. I did disable the commercial marking, but it appears that's not what it was - one thing is that as of right now I don't have any actual TV signal running in (although it's working), and I have no shows set up to record since I'm just trying to get the box stable before putting it side by side with my Tivo.

I moved a few boards around in the box to try and get some off the same IRQ. No love - several are still sharing IRQ 11, and while I don't know if that's the problem, I'm still left wondering if it could be some IRQ conflict with my ethernet board?

So I just now did an SSH into the machine from my WinXP box using Putty and did a to see if I could find anything in the log.

The log is huge so I just held the spacebar to run through a section real quick and BAM - crashed the box (hard crash). MythFrontEnd was running at the time when this happened.

So then I quite the FrontEnd after rebooting and tried the same thing. No crash. I then launched the FrontEnd and the box died seconds later (my ssh session was still open).

Does this sound like something funky on the networking side to you guys? Or is it possible some cron job is running that's killing the box only when the FrontEnd starts? I don't seem to ever crash doing any work when the front end is not running (I'm going to test this by quitting the FrontEnd today and leave the box runnign while at work).

Any ideas? Thanks for the help so far!

well, gee, now that I thought it was stable... it exploded... because of no more space on the root partition... seems that between kernel and syslog the box had utilized ~ 1 gb of space in the / volume... apparently my box experienced a panic or something... and syslog was > 500mb by its self... Kernel seems to be a virtual mirror of some of the data going into syslog... dang, just after midnight...



and then I see this:


then it keeps repeating the last one until the root partition was FULL...

Oh, other notable pieces of information about my system:

Abit AN7 (Nforce 2 chipset)
PVR-350
Wintv-401
Seagate sata 160
on-board audio card Via spdif-Optical out
Geforce 4mx w/ svid out (I haven't been very successful with TVout on the 350)
knopmyth R4v4.1 upgraded with mythtv 0.16 deb's...
IVTV 1.9 drivers...

Sounds like the problem I had with a VIA chipset MB I had. I switched to a non-VIA (don't remember the chipset, but I think it's an NFORCE), and I haven't had a problem since.

which nvidia drivers did you use?

whichever one it was you might want to try reinstalling it, because there are some errors about it in there.

I know you have the nforce, but it does sound alot like the via problems sounds like it's crashing anytime there is a large amount of dma activity. would be lots of disk write, or lots of network activity. Would be really good if you could somehow get so much stuff from being on int11 for sure though.

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

Xsecrets

I had such hard locks caused by the network cards (different types). Try to pull yours and see whether that helps.

Johannes

Going to try a new network card and see if that works when I get back from work today.

I also noticed in syslog this:


Does that look like something I should be concerned about?

well that is just the bttv driver failing to find a device, if you do not have a software based card it is not a huge deal, but then again there is no reason to attempt to load bttv if you do not have a software device.

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

Xsecrets

So I borrowed a NIC from a friend (a 3COM 3C905), managed to fumble my way through installing the module (I hope correctly), and am testing everything out tonight. So far, if I use my previous tests as an example, it's going pretty well.

I'm going to try and transcode a DVD tonight and see if it makes it through. If so, I'd say that swapping out the NIC worked. Coincidentally, the new NIC sits at IRQ 5, which could point to the IRQ problem.

Once again, many thanks to everyone who has helped - I truly appreciate it!