[mythtv-users] 2 recordings failed at the same time

[Jim Abernathy]

On 10/26/20 8:11 AM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Oct 2020 06:56:09 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> On 10/26/20 6:41 AM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>>> I do not think those permissions messages are a real problem.  My
>>> reading of them is that you are probably running mythbackend as
>>> non-root user, so it does not have the right permissions to send power
>>> control commands or to set program priorities.  So I think those are
>>> red herrings.
>>>
>>> Using a slightly older version of mythfrontend should not be any
>>> problem - all the protocols used to talk between MythTV programs are
>>> only supposed to be changed with a major version, and they all have
>>> protocol version information anyway.
>>>
>>> There is not much detail in the log about the recording process, so it
>>> is very difficult to tell what happened.  I would recommend adding the
>>> "-v record" option to the mythbackend command line to get it to log
>>> about the recording process in future.
>> Stephen,
>>
>> My backend is started on boot by systemd and mythtv-backend.service
>> contains in part:
>>
>> [Service]
>> User=mythtv
>> EnvironmentFile=-/etc/mythtv/additional.args
>> ExecStart=/usr/bin/mythbackend --quiet --syslog local7 $ADDITIONAL_ARGS
>> StartLimitBurst=10
>> StartLimitInterval=10m
>> Restart=on-failure
>> RestartSec=1
>>
>> So would I replace the "--quiet" with "-v record"??
>>
>> Jim A
> No.  That is set up the Ubuntu way, so command line arguments get put
> in the /etc/mythtv/additional.args file so you do not need to mess
> around with systemd.  So your /etc/mythtv/additional.args file should
> look like:
>
> ADDITIONAL_ARGS=-v record
>
> plus any other command line arguments that are already in that file.
> The systemd "EnvironmentFile=" line tells systemd to read that file as
> a set of environment variables.  The - after the = tells systemd that
> it is OK (not an error) if the file does not exist.  The
> $ADDITIONAL_ARGS on the end of the ExecStart line tells systemd that
> the contents of the environment variable ADDITIONAL_ARGS is to be
> substituted there, as in bash scripts.
>
> The /etc/mythtv/additional.args file should have decent ownership and
> permissions.  I have mine as chown mythtv:mythtv and chmod ug=rw,o=r.
>
> Once you have that set up, at a convenient time you can restart
> mythbackend to have it run with the new command line settings:
>
> sudo systemctl restart mythtv-backend
>
> In the mean time you can tell the running copy of mythtbackend to add
> the -v record option immediately:
>
> mythbackend --setverbose record
>
> Do not mistype commands like that one or you will wind up with a
> second copy of mythbackend running in the background as it did not
> find an option on the command line to tell it to just send a message
> to the running copy and then shut down.  If that happens, use "ps -ef
> | grep mythbackend" to find the PID of the second copy and kill it
> with "sudo kill <pid>" (twice if necessary).  You know which copy is
> which by its command line options.
>
> In your mythtv-backend.service settings, there is "User=mythtv" which
> confirms my suspicion that you are running mythbackend as a non-root
> user, which is the normal way it is run.

Thanks, Stephen. Great explanation. Changes made, so if I have issues 
again, we'll have more data.

Jim A