[mythtv-users] HDHR - occasional "Added 0 devices" / "Unable to find a free device" when attempting to record a show

[Will Dormann]

On 11/25/23 6:46 PM, Will Dormann wrote:
> The HDHR device is never terribly busy, but I see in the above:
>   Added 0 devices from 131F1E8E
>   Unable to find a free device


So just to follow up for the benefit of anybody who may be playing along:

I recently attempted to ping my HDHR device from my MythTV box, and sure 
enough I was (un)lucky enough to catch it at a point where the device 
was not answering ping responses!  At which point, this is clearly 
beyond the scope of being a problem in anything MythTV related.

To eliminate variables, I tried swapping out the Ethernet cable and also 
the power supply to my HDHR box.  In a 90-minute ping session to the 
device, over 12% of packets are lost.  Similarly a 90-minute ping 
session to another device (a NAS) connected to the same network device 
(the Verizon Wifi box, which has a few Ethernet ports) resulted in 0 
packet loss.

The HDHR device was connected to a port on the Verizon AP that is 
labeled as 10GbE LAN.  Just on a whim, I switched the NAS and the HDHR 
so that the HDHR is on a regular (non-10GbE port) and the NAS device now 
occupied the 10GbE port.  I also switched back to my original ethernet 
cable and PSU for the HDHR.  The result?  Both the NAS and the HDHR have 
gone through a 90-minute ping session with zero dropped packets each.

I probably won't know for close to a week, but I'll predict that my 
"randomly" missing HDHR recordings problem might be gone with this change.


The lessons here are:
- Any system with more than one variable will get increasingly more 
complicated to troubleshoot with the addition of any new variables.
- Don't kid yourself by thinking you have any idea of how computers 
work.  :)



-WD