[vdr] Re: Error handling vs. user friendliness.

["christian jacobsen" <Christian.Jacobsen@stageholding.de>]

Hallo,

> > This will still not avoid the endless reload cycles.  It 
> might be OK to
> > make one or two tries to reload drivers.  But when two 
> reloads don't help,
> > two hundered reloads won't help either.

I think that VDR should log an error whenever the Timers or the Channels
are wrong !!!
Maybe it could also stay up for a minute and show a Warning that
Channels.conf is broken.

I once had a Badly broken channels.conf with NO channels at all, but VDR
did not restart!
Therefore I don't like the idea of removing timers that could not be set
to a channel. It would only be OK if VDR does not save that state on
exititing !!

> To be fair, this is something which should then be catered 
> for in the 'runvdr' 
> script rather than in VDR itself

Here is what I have done, it saved me a couple of times :)

On shutting down VDR, in my "-r" script, I have this :

# Backup Last Known Good Config Files !
cp -f /etc/vdr/setup.conf /etc/vdr/setup.conf.LKG
cp -f /etc/vdr/timers.conf /etc/vdr/timers.conf.LKG
cp -f /etc/vdr/channels.conf /etc/vdr/channels.conf.LKG

This saves a state that should be OK. 

(I also do a copy of the last 10 *.conf in my runvdr (outside the while
loop) so that I always can find a working version if "LKG" does not
work.)

And in my runvdr I have the following lines, not very pretty, but works
:), after the start of VDR in the while loop.

I am not sure if this works with timers.conf and setup.conf, but the
channels.conf part definetly works - it "reactivated" VDR a couple of
times in the last 2 years :)
IIRC my wife shut off the Server by removing the Power at least one of
the times ;)

        su -p -c "$VDRCMD" $VDRUSR
        STATUS=$?
        if test $STATUS -eq 0; then exit; fi

        # channels.conf OK ?
        tail -20 /var/log/messages| grep ERROR |grep channels.conf |grep
line >/dev/null 2>&1
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
          logger "channels.conf Broken - activating Last Know Good (LKG)
!!"
          echo svdrpsend.pl MESG "channels.conf Broken - activating Last
Know Good !! >/dev/null 2>&1"|at now+1 min
          cp /etc/vdr/channels.conf.LKG /etc/vdr/channels.conf
        fi


        # setup.conf OK ?
        tail -20 /var/log/messages| grep ERROR |grep setup.conf |grep
line >/dev/null 2>&1
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
          logger "setup.conf Broken - activating Last Know Good (LKG)
!!"
          echo svdrpsend.pl MESG "setup.conf Broken - activating Last
Know Good !! >/dev/null 2>&1"|at now+1 min
          cp /etc/vdr/setup.conf.LKG /etc/vdr/setup.conf
        fi

        # timers.conf OK ?
        tail -20 /var/log/messages| grep ERROR |grep timers.conf |grep
line >/dev/null 2>&1
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
          logger "timers.conf Broken - activating Last Know Good (LKG)
!!"
          echo svdrpsend.pl MESG "timers.conf Broken - activating Last
Know Good !! >/dev/null 2>&1"|at now+1 min
          cp /etc/vdr/timers.conf.LKG /etc/vdr/timers.conf
        fi


You can also use this in commands.conf :

Activate Last Know Good channels.conf? : cp /etc/vdr/channels.conf.LKG
/etc/vdr/channels.conf; printf "\n\nLast Known Good Channels.conf
activated\n\nNow Please Restart VDR !"


Greeting
Christian Jacobsen