[mythtv-users] Hard crashes of mythtv backends

[Norm Dugas]

Michael Rice wrote:
> On 11/5/07, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> In my case this is the third CPU/MB/RAM/PSU/case I've used for my
> backend with the same problem.  And current backend (Core 2 Duo/Intel
> MB) is almost the same hardware as my Windows box that sits right next
> to it and never crashes.
>
> I thought it was hardware after the first two backends but at this
> point if it is hardware other than the one of the pvr's I would be
> very surprised.  Once I move the computers to other tasks they never
> crash again.
>
> I guess the 3 pvrs could be overheating the machines... I guess I can
> try to monitor the temperature.  But buying a new motherboard doesn't
> seem likely to help me.  Believe me if I knew what to buy to fix this
> I would...  :)
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>   
I've been experiencing intermittent crashes for about 6 months on my
FE/BE combo.  It ran for about 18 months without problems then out of
nowhere, it started to lock up.  I've been able to determine that it
locks up when it tries to start a recoding on my PVR-350.  What's
causing the crashes is still a mystery since there's no extra info in
the system logs.  My system:

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
Athlon XP 2500
1 Gig ram
Hauppauge PVR-350
GeForce FX 5500
Firewire connected DCT6412
XFS over LVM for my myth partition.

One other thing I noticed about the time the lockups started is every
now and then (maybe every 2 weeks), I get the following error in my
messages file:
Oct 22 14:33:18 pvrbox MCE: The hardware reports a non fatal,
correctable incident occurred on CPU 0.

I'm in the process of planning out a new front end and migrating to a
new backend system so figuring it out is not as pressing as it was before.