[mythtv-users] More schedules direct problems

Frank Phillips frankalso at gmail.com
Wed Apr 2 04:57:29 UTC 2014


On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 11:21 PM, faginbagin <mythtv at hbuus.com> wrote:

>
> I have also been having problems with mythfilldatabase. I found
> --dd-grab-all worked some of the time, depending on the time of day. Next I
> looked at my log files, which weren't that helpful. Then I moved
> /usr/bin/mythfilldatabase to the side and put a shell script in its place
> that would run the binary mythfilldatabase with debug logging options, when
> executed by mythbackend. I found that, in my case, the root cause is that
> downloads from schedules direct are timing out, especially if
> mythfilldatabase is run shortly after 2am or 9pm (pre DST) or 10pm (post
> DST). But sometimes, I get a partial download with some <fault...> tags.
> Since its not a mythtv bug, I reported my problems and observations on the
> schedules direct support forum. If you want the gory details and want to
> compare your experience to mine, here's the forum thread:
> http://forums.schedulesdirect.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2541
>
>
This was what Ian Evans, Phil Bridges and I seemed to agree on in the
February thread (Automatic mythfilldatabase...) - download errors occurring
around 0200 UTC. To illustrate the problem I've attached a script and
output from my backend. The errors really started up in January. My days of
guide data was getting into the single digits too often to ignore.

Schedules direct seems to think the problem is actually with Tribune's
> servers, the true source of the listings data. While I wait for a solution
> from either Tribune or schedules direct, I am experimenting with cron jobs
> run a different times of day, trying to find the sweet spot of a time of
> day that works more often than not.
>
>
My theory is that with the old mfdb run window being 2-5 before it was
changed to 0-23, a lot of people started hitting that 0200(UTC change bug?)
time and TMS blacklisted us for that time.

Whatever the cause, to mitigate failing runs I filed bug #12101. You can
see my results with the patch over the last week in the attached file.

I do think mythfilldatabase could do a better job figuring out what is and
> is not a successful run. It has been reporting success, even when every
> download attempt in a given run has timed out and no new listings data has
> been added to my system.
>

Agreed. Seeing "Success" at the bottom of mythweb or in mythfrontend  gives
the user a false sense of security.


> HTH,
> Helen
>
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