[mythtv-users]WAF question: dealing with crashes

Jason Werpy jwwerpy at gmail.com
Thu Oct 21 14:45:13 UTC 2004


> >It _is_ however, 'par for the course' for people to bitch about a
> >problem and not provide any useful information to help in debugging it.
> 
> So is there a procedure so I can find out what has happened when Myth
> Crashes and report it?
> 
> I've had 5-6 crashes per week since I installed MythTv (not bitching
> yet...)
> But my Linux experience is limited
> 
> (read: I'm a windows expert and I only installed Linux so I can run
> Myth)
> 
> When a crash has occurred, I've looked through the log files
> (in /var/log, is this where I should look???) but I've not really every
> come
> across information that looks useful when Myth Frontend or Myth Backend
> abends.....
> 
> When the front end crashes it usually just dumps me out to X and it's
> either F1-R or
> Reboot to get it all back.
> 
> I'm a professional software developer so I would be more than happy to
> report the reason
> For crashes -- if I know how to do so in a useful manner....
> 
> 

On my box I have the startup script open a xterm window and then start
mythbackend and frontend.  When a crash happens for the frontend, I
just type killall -9 mythfrontend ; mythfrontend & and start it back
up.  I've even taught my 9 year old son how to use the arrow keys to
get back to that command and run it if the frontend disappears.  I do
the killall just to be thorough, and because the command will still
work if the frontend locks up (just alt-tab to the xterm and run the
above command).  For the backend, I actually have cron configured to
check every so often and restart it if it crashes, but I don't think
it crashes very often.  Then again I don't have to check because of
the cron job.


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