[mythtv-users] Wife Acceptance Factor question: dealing with crashes

Ryan A. Carris racarris at gmail.com
Thu Oct 21 14:07:19 UTC 2004


On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:07:34 -0400, Terry Mark <terry.mark at gmail.com> wrote:
> I setup a Myth box using Jarod's guide under FC2.  There are still
> some rough edges (I have to run alsactl myself on login, the mythtv
> user doesn't log in automatically, etc), but there's enough working
> that I was willing to put in front of my wife.
> 
> She loves it.  However, Myth seems to crash a lot.  Mostly it's the
> frontend, usually in response to some apparently random button press
> on the remote, but occassionally the backend crashes.  Since I'm using
> the same motherboard Jarod specs in his guide (Chaintech 7NIF2 using
> the onboard video; also a pair of  PVR250s), and nothing else is
> running on these machines,  I'm assuming that I'm not the only one
> living with these problems.
> 
> I can ssh into the machine myself and kill/restart the frontend, and I
> can restart the backend myself.  But my wife can't, nor could my
> parents or grandparents or my kids.  This is seriously affecting the
> WAF, since I'm trying to convince her that I need to buy and build a
> few frontends...
> 
> So, what do people do in these situations ? And, should I worry about
> the crashes, or are these par for the course ?
> 

First, thank you Isaac and all the other devels.  I am very greatful
of all your hard work.  And, I totally agree 100% with your comments.

That said, my mythbox is pretty stable, but I do get random crashes
once in a long while (maybe once a month, which I beleive are related
to my outdated 2.4.21 kernel and outdated ittv drivers, not Myth, but
I consider it stable enough to spend my time doing other things than
updating the box.)

But a while back, before I went out of town for two week, I was able
to teach my wife in case of a crash to get out the wireless keyboard
that I have hidden, hit alt-tab, ctrl-c on the two term windows, and
then type mythbackend and mythfrontend.  And, wouldn't you know, it
crashed on her and she was able to restart it!  I'm not sure if I've
ever been so proud of my wife!  :)


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