[mythtv-users] Database issue? Recordings not showing up in frontend

[Michael T. Dean]

On 09/15/2015 11:21 AM, Paul Stillwell wrote:
> On Sep 15, 2015, at 6:30 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> On 09/15/2015 09:26 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>>> On 09/14/2015 10:44 PM, Mike Holden wrote:
>>>> But deletepending appears to be 1 for the records posted earlier? Not sure I understand the comments about corrupted databases?
>>> Ah, you're right. I misread it because of the bad wrapping and thought the filesize values were the deletepending values.
>>>
>>> So, a 1 means that the backend was in the process of deleting them. Because they're not actually deleting, that means that something very bad happened to the backend when it was in the process and they got stuck in a limbo state, where they're not deleted, but they're not available.
>> BTW, something very bad like a very ugly shutdown (power outage/kill -KILL/...) at a very bad time (the tiny amount of time when deletion is in a dangerous state) right after the recordings were deleted.
> OK, looks like this is resolved for me. It looks like the recordings were stuck somehow and I was able to recover them by cleaning up the deletepending flag.
>
> The very bad thing that happened to my database

Actually, I didn't explain it well, but the very bad thing has to happen 
to mythbackend--the database itself can't cause the problem. It could 
possibly even be cause by a very badly-timed backend crash, so maybe 
that happened and something automatically restarted it for you, so you 
didn't realize?

>   was find_orphans.py. I’m not sure what went wrong with it, but everything was fine until I ran that and then everything wasn’t fine.

find_orphans.py just asked mythbackend to delete all your recordings 
(metadata).  It did this because your recording files were not 
there--likely because you had misconfigured (or hadn't yet 
configured/updated) your Storage Groups or your file systems referenced 
by your Storage Group directory lists weren't mounted/accessible (i.e. 
permissions or whatever) by the backend(s) when find_orphans.py was run.

>   Now that I think about it, wasn’t there some scripts that we were not supposed to use anymore when we went to 0.27? I have some nagging thought in the back of my head about something changing and some scripts not working anymore, but I can’t remember.
>
> Thanks to everyone for their help!!

find_orphans.py works just fine with 0.27 (and likely even development, 
though it's not guaranteed to work with development). The only reason it 
failed for you is because a) your backends were unable to find the 
recording files you had and b) you told it to delete the long list of 
recordings, which turned out to be all your recordings.

find_orphans.py simply talks to the backend, asking it for the list of 
all the recording metadata, the list of all the files in the Storage 
Group directory lists, and--if you tell it to do so--to delete the 
metadata and/or files that are lacking matching files/metadata.  It's 
primarily scripts that do things themselves--especially manipulating and 
changing data directly--that are dangerous.

Anyway, I'm glad you got things working again.

Mike