[mythtv-users] mythbackend 0.28 spins up external backup USB hard disk all the time

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 23 Sep 2017 23:21:49 +0200, you wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I just upgraded from MythTV 0.27.6 to 0.28.1 (Gentoo).
>
>There is one thing that really bothers me:
>Since the upgrade, my external USB backup drive is spinning up all the
>time.
>Normally, this should be down all the time (until my daily backup).
>
>This drive is not a storage drive for MythTV.
>
>I have udisks configured via udev to leave the drive alone and this is
>working fine since years.
>
>I can see in the syslog that this is happening after upgrading MythTV to
>0.28.1.
>
>On that machine, only mythbackend is running, not mythfrontend, so it
>cannot by the Media Scanner, right?
>
>Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks!
>
>Regards,
>Thomas

It could be the Media Monitor - that automatically mounts USB devices
so that media from them can be played.  If it is Media Monitor, then
the drive will likely be being mounted under /media somewhere.  Mine
show up under /media/stephen, as my mythfrontend is run from user
"stephen".

Try excluding your USB drive from Media Monitor - go to Setup >
General > Media Monitor and add the USB drive partitions to the
"Ignore devices" settings.  For my external USB 3 dual drive mount, I
have "/dev/sdo1,/dev/sdp1" here, which prevents mythfrontend from
automounting my archive drives before systemd can automount them in
the correct place on /mnt/arc1, /mnt/arc2 and /mnt/arc3.  So far, I
have found that "Ignore devices" only works with the direct /dev
partition names, not the aliases such as those under
/dev/disk/by-label.  I am guessing that is because it only resolves
the aliases when mythfrontend starts.  It also does not work with
wildcards.

Personally, I would prefer an option to completely disable the Media
Monitor feature, as it will grab any USB media I plug in, and I do not
use USB devices for playing files from.  So all it does is cause me
problems.  And it is difficult to list enough things in "Ignore
devices" to ensure that any particular USB drive you plug in will not
be grabbed, as the device names for them change depending on what port
you plug into, and on what USB devices have previously been plugged
in.  The only solution I have found for preventing Media Monitor from
grabbing a new USB drive is to shut down mythfrontend before plugging
it in.  Then I can mount it myself where I want it to be, and if
necessary change the IgnoreDevices setting in the mythconverg settings
table, before starting mythfrontend again.