[mythtv-users] Problem with boot time system lockup on new install of Mythbuntu 12.04

Craig Huff huffcslists at gmail.com
Tue Apr 15 20:17:32 UTC 2014


I took the earlier advice to start writing down all the startup
messages and start narrowing down which ones I _didn't_ see.  In the
process, I thought of things I hadn't thoroughly tested yet.  My
problem turned out to be at least mostly my own fault, and probably
all my own doing.  IguanaWorks provides a debian packaged driver for
their IR transceiver which runs as an old-style (/etc/init.d) script
called from the various /etc/rc#.d directories for the various
runlevels.  I had had a problem with a race condition that I solved by
converting it to an upstart (/etc/init) script that starts when the
filesystems have been mounted _and_ udev has found and reported the
appropriate usb-device-added.  Unfortunately, I hadn't quite accounted
for the differences between upstart on Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 12.04
correctly.  After 30 or 40 more reboots, I think I've finally divined
all the nuances that needed fixing.  In addition, I learned not to
trust the udev documentation about leaving original udev rules
untouched in /lib/udev/rules.d and creating overriding rules in
/etc/udev/rules.d -- seems my override rule was resulting in udev
reporting the device added twice each boot (at least on 12.04) -- not
a good thing.  In taking care of that, I also discovered that the
support program IguanaWorks provided that is intended to ensure that
the device communication socket gets created if it is missing, has a
coding bug (at least on the Ubuntu 12.04 platform), because it tests
for strings matching each other with the "==" operator, but it gets
run in the dash shell, not the bourne shell, so those tests generate
error messages that I was having way too much fun trying to track down
the source of.  It probably didn't make a hill of beans, as far as
causing problems, but I didn't know that when I had a problem that
wasn't solved yet, so I replaced them with the supported string
comparison operator "=" and the error messages went away.

In summary, I think I have the problem solved, but won't believe it
until I've done another 30 or 40 consecutive successful boot/reboot
operations.

Thank you all for your suggestions and comments.  They always give me
new ways to look at problems.

--
Craig.


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