[mythtv-users] Hard crashes of mythtv backends

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/05/2007 01:53 PM, Michael Rice wrote:
> I've been running mythtv for about a year and a half (now on svn
> trunk) and went through three different backend machines and from FC4
> to FC6 now.   One nagging problem that persists is hard crashes of the
> backend every so often.  On average it stays up for 7-10 days but
> sometimes less.  Yesterday for instance I rebooted several times to
> configure my HDHR on its own NIC.   The backend locked up (no ping, no
> mouse/keyboard, requires power cycle to recover) at 5:00pm after an
> uptime of only 3-4 hours.

I was having similar issues with my master backend...  It was purely
hardware--and I knew it from the start, but that didn't stop me from
living with it for almost exactly a year.  I was unwilling to "admit
defeat" by just replacing the hardware and tried all sorts of things to
fix the problem, all the while living with an unreliable Myth system.

Finally, I admitted that the chipset (from a "high-performance" chipset
vendor) was garbage (second-generation is still too new to be reliable)
and replaced the motherboard with one having a (low-performance) chipset
that was identical to the one in my (rock-solid stable) slave backend. 
Best $50 I ever spent (socket 462 MB's are relatively expensive from a
"bang-for-the-buck" perspective since no one is making them these
days).  In all, trying to reuse a computer and trying to fix it cost me
about 3x as much as I would have spent just buying a new
CPU/MB/RAM/PSU/case--and that's completely discounting the value of my time.

Well, I guess I should go check the system status after having tempted
fate by saying I fixed the issue.

Mike