[mythtv-users] MythTV 0.23 backend suddenly auto-expired a ton of recordings...

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Fri Aug 13 04:31:45 UTC 2010


    > Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:21:41 -0400
    > From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

    >   On 08/13/2010 12:13 AM, f-myth-users wrote:
    > > It's also weird that, judging by some recent reports I've seen, it
    > > seems to expire things in such a random order.  (I seem to recall
    > > another relatively-recent "it expired everything" bug report, again
    > > saying things went in a random order, but I can't find that, either;
    > > the most-recent example was a spider hitting someone's mythweb---not
    > > the expirer at all---and I'm definitely not thinking of that one.)

    > The "randomness" of the order has to do with which file system is in 
    > use/needs something expired.  So, if MythTV records to a file system 
    > that only has shows recorded this week on it and another file system has 
    > shows recorded 7 years ago, it will expire something from this 
    > week--because, well, expiring one of those shows from 7 years ago won't 
    > help us fit /this/ recording on /this/ file system.

Fair enough.  I certainly can't remember the prior reports well enough
to know if SG's were in use, etc.

    > Again, though, in all my time with MythTV (since Feb 2004), there has 
    > never been (TTBOMK) a case where "the autoexpirer went crazy".  Its 
    > failure mode has always been to stop expiring things when they needed 
    > expiring (which usually results in a file system filling up).  If 
    > someone has information on a case where that's not true, I'd love to see it.

Wasn't there some case where someone incorrectly specified a storage
directory (I can't remember if it was a true SG---probably not because
NFS would be unlikely there, but maybe it was a NAS...) at the root of a
filesystem, instead of one level down, resulting in an NFS mount failure
causing Myth to think the disk was full and expire everything?  Yes,
that's a user error, but the failure mode might not show up for a long
time, and the punishment is rather severe... :)  [Maybe this behavior
has since been fixed somehow, though it's not immediately apparent to
me how Myth would know, unless it's now smart enough to say, "Whoops,
an attempted deletion apparently did nothing to the freespace---stop
and complain."]


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