[mythtv-users] MythTV 0.23 backend suddenly auto-expired a ton of recordings...

[Brett Kosinski]

>> Alternatively, I suppose I could go and hack the code myself and add
>> the necessary detail if its not possible to enable it through
>> command-line flags.
>
> The logs you have would still have some interesting information in them.
>  Things like:
>
> 2010-08-13 00:25:37.505 AutoExpire: CalcParams(): Max required Free Space:
> 2.0 GB w/freq: 14 min

I checked those, as I wanted to see if it was getting the max required
wrong, but unfortunately, no, they all just look like this:

2010-08-11 15:51:03.427 AutoExpire: CalcParams(): Max required Free
Space: 30.0 GB w/freq: 15 min

Where the free space count varies between 30 and 32 GB (which itself
is a bit odd... makes me wonder how that value is computed for
display).

> and more would give some picture of what was happening at the time when
> things were expired (number of recordings, when they occurred, how many
> occurred, etc.).

I'm not sure where to look for these things.  I've spent many a year
combing logs on unix systems, and from what I can tell, the events
before the start of the expiration sequence are pretty vanilla.   One
recording had stopped and two started 5 minutes prior.  There was one
file that had a bad read ("Invalid file (fd -1) when opening"), which
could be indicative of FS corruption.  Max free space was indicated as
32 GB, and then it started expiring.

And note, most of the other expiration events are not preceded by
open() errors, which makes me think that's unrelated...

> If you really want to watch for some failure, you can use -v
> important,general,file (or for very verbose logs, -v
> important,general,file,extra ), but I don't think you'll see anything too
> interesting.

Hmm... sounds like I should patch the code, then.  Lucky for me, I
built out 0.23 by hand, so hacking up mythbackend to include more
information about why it's expiring recordings shouldn't be too
difficult (although, having not yet looked at the code, I don't know
if the information is available at the time the log record is made, so
I could be wrong about that).

Well, thanks anyway... to be honest, I was mainly hoping someone would
pop up with a "yeah, this is a known issue" answer.  But alas, it
sounds like something very strange happened on my box, which means
it's gonna be nigh on impossible to determine, after the fact, what
the heck happened.

On the bright side, I now have 300GB free, and my system is at least
partially relieved of a bunch of crap my wife was resisting
deleting... :)

Brett.