[mythtv-users] Yet another silly action to drive the mythbox crazy

[Nicolas Krzywinski]

Hi,

recently, I did just another epic silly mistake which had a huge impact on the functionality of my myth machine.


HERE comes the story (head on to the end if this is of no interest to you):

It all started with the program guide telling me the airdate of "Spy Game" - one of my favorite movies which I can recommend to anyone, not least because of the great soundtrack.
The broadcasting channel was ZDF HD (the second german channel under public law). Those channels are notorious for their huge delays when airing. When setting up the recording rules, I always set a big additional recording time at the end for recordings on those channels, therefore.
Now ... at that time I was in a hurry. I assume to having entered one zero too much for the recording overtime, resulting to 300 minutes instead of 30.
But this I did not knew, until my myth machine started to stumble suddenly, letting mythfrontend and mythwelcome die slowly, mute logfiles, ssh login shell crying some crazy stuff and mysql turn to some kind of disoriented state (what? I am supposed to have tables ...?).
"Quickly" (after three reboots, including cold restart with no recovery) I found out that the system disk was full.
Apparently I did silly stuff like this before, as my fingers automatically knew to execute the joker command "apt-get clean" to get some megs instantly. This allowed everything to start up as usual.
Then the investigation started, revealing a 46 gb recording named "Spy Game" with something more than 7 hours recording time in high definition. Roughly calculated back, this conforms to the mistake in setting the recording overtime, assumed above.
Looking on the solid state disk serving this partition being only ~128 gb, minus the system files, minus some recordings protected from deletion, it becomes clear that there was some hard time for the backend to manage the storage.

Though this is a rare case with a great influence of misuse, there is a simple solution to avoid such situations, described with the following...


HERE comes the proposal for improvement:

Always preserve some free space on the system partition for the background stuff being able to proceed their work.
This condition for reserving some free space should even stop recordings that would violate the free space otherwise.


What do you think about that?

Nicolas

-- 
www.nskcomputing.de