[mythtv-users] WARNING: SchedulesDirect users: server currently returning bogus results

Robert Eden rmeden at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 20 04:21:12 UTC 2009


On 12/19/2009 5:29 PM, Rod Smith wrote:
> On Saturday 19 December 2009 05:32:10 pm f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
>   
>> Watching the by-hand download showed it doing very little, and so I
>> logged into my SD account to see if the site was up, only to find a
>> lurid warning at the top of the page about server problems.
>>     
>
> Where do you see this warning? Can you post a URL? I just checked and I don't 
> see anything obvious on the SD site, at 6:24PM Eastern time. My last update 
> was at 1:39 PM today, and it didn't cause me any problems, although I don't 
> think it inserted any new data. Maybe the problem existed for just an hour or 
> two
re: the subject...
I don't think we (SD) returned bogus results... we returned an error 
message and a bad status code.  I guess MythTV ignores that and erases 
the DB.  Sounds like a bug to me.   I know tv_grab_na_dd detected the 
problem and exited with a non-zero exit status.

re: other stuff
Every 5 minutes I have a cron job that runs various tests.  The first 
time it finds a problem, the it is flagged as a "possible" problem.  The 
next time it fails it's considered a "problem".  Once the test succeeds, 
it is marked as "improving".  The duration of "improving" depends on how 
long the "problem" was.

If we are in any of these states for any of the monitored services, a 
message is automatically added to the top of  the 
http:/www.schedulesdirect.org and http://forum.schedulesdirect.org web 
sites.  The thinking is if you think something is wrong, you'll log on 
to your account or our forum to investigate and hopefully see the 
message.  We also disable certain web application features (sign ups, 
payments, etc) to avoid having to fix problems later.

The outage today was huge. I think it was 4am-6pm  EST. I  personally 
reported it to the after-hours number around 11am EST.  I haven't heard 
what went wrong yet from the Tribune tech folks, but it was very 
unusual, possibly the longest on record.  The SD web app and XMLTV 
tv_grab_na_dd client worked as designed, and I didn't get any customer 
service calls, emails, or forum posts through SD channels.

The SD forum is vero low volume.  It is monitored and frankly could use 
more MythTV folks responding to MythTV users with problems.  I usually 
direct Myth users to this mailing list since there hasn't been good 
responses in the SD forum.  Announcements are made when there is 
something to report, but we've been in "cruise" mode for a while.

Robert Eden
XMLTV
Schedules Direct
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20091219/e14eb1e9/attachment.htm>


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list