[mythtv-users] Wife Acceptance Factor question: dealing with crashes

[Isaac Richards]

On Wednesday 20 October 2004 04:07 pm, Terry Mark wrote:
> I setup a Myth box using Jarod's guide under FC2.  There are still
> some rough edges (I have to run alsactl myself on login, the mythtv
> user doesn't log in automatically, etc), but there's enough working
> that I was willing to put in front of my wife.
>
> She loves it.  However, Myth seems to crash a lot.  Mostly it's the
> frontend, usually in response to some apparently random button press
> on the remote, but occassionally the backend crashes.  Since I'm using
> the same motherboard Jarod specs in his guide (Chaintech 7NIF2 using
> the onboard video; also a pair of  PVR250s), and nothing else is
> running on these machines,  I'm assuming that I'm not the only one
> living with these problems.
>
> I can ssh into the machine myself and kill/restart the frontend, and I
> can restart the backend myself.  But my wife can't, nor could my
> parents or grandparents or my kids.  This is seriously affecting the
> WAF, since I'm trying to convince her that I need to buy and build a
> few frontends...
>
> So, what do people do in these situations ? And, should I worry about
> the crashes, or are these par for the course ?

If you don't bother to properly report a crash, it can't be fixed.  What 
you're seeing is certainly not 'par for the course'.  My combined 
backend/frontend machine has been running now for around 40 days with quite a 
heavy recording schedule.  

It _is_ however, 'par for the course' for people to bitch about a problem and 
not provide any useful information to help in debugging it.

Isaac