[mythtv-users] I broke my mythTV, help!

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 09:35:42 -0800, you wrote:

>I deleted the backend log to get rid of old data, and make sure only data from after the update was recorded. It has not been
>re-created.
>If I run in a terminal, mythbackend runs fine, and all the data that should appear in the log shows up in the terminal window.
>This unfortunately gives me no clue why it is not running like it used to.
>
>When I copied the data over, I did a rsync -a which should have kept all of the users, groups, and permissions the same.
>
>
>I just did a ls /home and found this:
>drwxr-xr-x  6 hplip  nvidia-persistenced 4096 Jul  5  2014 mythtv
>
>This did not make sense to me, so I changed it to this:
>drwxr-xr-x  6 mythtv mythtv 4096 Jul  5  2014 mythtv
>
>It did not help.

When you create a new system, the numbers corresponding to the user
and group names are different.  The numbers are what matter, not the
names.  So when you copy things from a different system, as you did
with rsync, you will get the group and user numbers from your old
system, which will correspond to different groups and users on the new
system.  And often there will be no user or group with that number, so
in directory listings you will see just a number displayed.  So you
need to go to all the files you copied like that and change their user
and group ownership to the correct things for the new system. Use
"sudo chown -R" to propagate the changes down each directory tree. The
only user that can be copied safely between systems is root, which is
always 0.  The permissions bits are the same between systems, so you
should not need to do any chmod commands.

It is likely that you are getting lots of different permissions
problems as a result of this, and that is causing mythbackend to fail.

I would recommend doing these commands as a minimum:

sudo chown -R mythtv:mythtv /home/mythtv

sudo chown -R <user>:<group> /home/<user>
  (where <user> and <group> are the user name and group name used for
the mythfrontend user on the new system)

sudo chown -R mythtv:mythtv <each mythtv storage group>