[mythtv-users] Error upgrading database schema from 1214 to 1215

Marc Randolph mrand at pobox.com
Sun Sep 5 00:27:37 UTC 2010


On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Will C <dontspamme at will.is-a-geek.org> wrote:
>> After the upgrade, mythtv-backend and mythtv-setup both fail while trying
>> to upgrade the database schema from version 1214 to 1254. It appears that
>> the failure occurs in the first incremental upgrade, from 1214 to 1215.
>> Here is the output of mythtv-setup:
>
> I have solved this. It turned out to be very stupid, and neither a software
> bug nor a database corruption issue, but rather a system configuration
> problem. My /tmp directory was filling up during the part of the 1215 ->
> 1216 schema upgrade where it "tested" the database for character set related
> corruption.
>
> The only way I figured this out was going to the source code and piecing
> together the SQL commands that myth was trying to execute, then manually
> trying those same commands and seeing where they failed. As soon as I saw
> the actual mysql error message, I realized what the culprit was. For some
> stupid reason, the /tmp directory on this system was a small tmpfs. I got
> rid of that and everything worked fine.
>
> Myth 0.23.1 now appears to be running smoothly on my system.

While overall usability issues generally isn't viewed as a bug by the
FOSS community, proper handling of situations like this is on the
verge of being one, in my book.  Yes, you didn't have enough space in
/tmp.  But how much space is "enough" in order to perform the upgrade,
and how is the user to know?  We complain about Linux adoption, and
making the user step through SQL commands to discover the problem is
an example of why it is like it is.

The sad part is that a reboot would have fixed your problem because it
would have cleared out /tmp, but you would have been none the wiser.
Let's hope we don't getting to the stage that rebooting Linux machines
becomes standard operating procedure like it is for Windows.

   Marc


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