Recording fails on remote file system

[Les Noland <lnoland@…>]

I recently added a firewire connection to a STB to my mythtv setup. The STB is connected to my HTPC which houses a combination front end and slave back end. If I watch it in LiveTV it seems to work pretty reliably.

If I hit R (Record) in LiveTV, it generally records the program with no issues. If I schedule a recording on the STB, however, it is pretty hit-or-miss as to whether it will be successful. In most cases, it will tune the channel but will give up trying to record less than a minute later and there will be no file associated with the recording tombstone in the Myth "watch recorded" menu. Sometimes, going into upcoming recordings right away and selecting "Reactivate" for the show will result in a recording though that often fails as well. If, however, I switch to LiveTV, tune the channel and after it locks, I enter an R, it generally will record it just fine. I will attach an annotated log segment in which I conducted a test illustrating the problem.

I found the following which may shed light on my problem:

​http://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/9895

This is a much different problem than mine but it has the same symptoms I am seeing. It appears that the cause of the problem in the ticket is that in accessing remote files the files are often being returned with a slash prepended which confused the receiving software making it impossible to access the file. Given that I am seeing the same errors reported by the same routines, it is likely that my problem has the same cause -- when the slave backend attempts to access the recording file it gets a filename with a slash prepended and fails to open the file so it shuts down the recording.

Evidently the routine which does recording in liveTV doesn't have the same problem. It occurred to me that this might be because the LiveTV storage group is local to the slave backend and the problem is, apparently, only with remote files. To test this, I defined, on my slave backend, a default storage group which only includes local directories. Since doing that, recordings from the STB have been working flawlessly. This is not ideal, however, since it limits storage-balancing allowing the local storage to run out of space even when there is plently of space available in remote storage groups.

Though the ticket cited above is "closed" I don't know if that has any bearing on this issue since the problem areas were different so that fix may only be relevant to that problem.

[Les Noland <lnoland@…>]

This is the output of "mythbackend --version" on the slave backend

[Les Noland <lnoland@…>]

This is an annotated log-file segment from a test illustrating the problem

[sphery]

FWIW, no modern operating system has any issues with double path separators (/ or \ , depending on OS). In #9895, the problem was with mythui code making invalid assumptions.

The problem here seems to be one of Storage Group configuration. I'm going to close this as Unverified, for now, and if you'll post to the mythtv-users mailing list a description of the issue (recordings failing with "2011-08-24 07:10:15.654 TFW, Error: Opening file '/6410_20110824071000.mpg'. eno: Permission denied (13)") and a mythbackend -v file,extra log file attached, we can likely help you fix the issue, or, if we find a bug, I'll re-open the ticket.

Thanks.

[lnoland@…]

For what it's worth, I have already posted two email messages on this subject to the mythtv-users mailing list and received no responses whatsoever. I can try again, when I get home from work tonight but I'm not really sure why to expect a new message to succeed where the two previous did not even attract a single comment.

I am not sure what you mean by "and a mythbackend -v file,extra log file attached".