[mythtv-users] Myth records until drive is full (auto-expire is off)

[Nick Morrott]

On 29/11/2008, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> On 11/29/2008 04:41 PM, Gert wrote:
>  > MythTV keeps on recording until the recordings partition is full.
>  > When that happens, /var starts filling up because Myth logs "No space left on device" about every femtosecond.
>  > And, when /var is full... well... all hell breaks loose of course.
>  >
>  > I've also tried setting (translated from Dutch; may be not accurate):
>  > Frontend -> Settings -> TV -> General -> Extra disk space
>  > to 10GB. But with that set, and less than 10GB of free space, MythTV still starts recordings.
>  >
>  > Note that I don't use Auto-Expire (the logs say "Nothing to expire", which is correct).
>  > Might the problem be that free-space-management only gets done thru auto-expire policy, and not thru new recording policy?
>  > I mean, that MythTV keeps on recording no matter what, and expects Auto-Expire to clean up enough for new recordings?
>
>
> Yep.  If you want myth (a DV/R/ as in Recorder) to stop recording,
>  restart the master backend with --nosched until you watch/delete some shows.
>
>  Or, better, just enable autoexpire on the recording rules/recordings
>  about which you care the least.

Does anyone else feel this is the wrong way to do things? As an
_intelligent_ DVR, I think that if auto-expire is disabled for all
rules/recordings and the space available for recordings fills up or
hits its configured minimum space limit:

i) the scheduler gets disabled

ii) the upcoming recordings screen (and backend log) shows a warning
stating this, and that no further recordings can be made until some
space is freed up (and recommend using auto-expire to avoid this
happening in the future). Playing back an existing warning could also
display a message to this effect via mythtvosd.

iii) future LiveTV sessions exits before starting playback with a
similar warning message

iv) mythbackend catches the "out of disk space" error/exception,
aborts any in-progress recordings, and syslog escapes mostly unharmed.

As I stated in an earlier thread, I have no experience with a
commercial DVR, but when faced with a similar disk full scenario, do
they:

i) block any future recordings and display warning
ii) automatically start deleting old recordings to make room for new ones

Many users treat their MythTV systems as appliances. Having them
potentially break* due to "unfriendly" behaviour is something that I'd
argue should be removed as far as possible. I'd rather miss some new
recordings and be told why, than have to manually intervene and rescue
a system that has run out of diskspace.

* any idea how many users have /var/log on a separate partition?

Nick

-- 
Nick Morrott

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