[mythtv-users] Script to keep DCT-6xxx boxes alive

[Steven Adeff]

On 6/28/07, Tom Greer <trgreer at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been using MythTV for a couple of years now.  I absolutely love
> it.  My thanks to the developers.
>
> In my home, I have four combo frontend/backend systems.  Three have
> Motorola DCT-6xxx boxes attached.  The fourth is connected to an
> HDHomeRun unit.
>
> At this point, the system is pretty stable.  However, my most frequent
> points of failure are the DCT boxes.  Every couple of days one of the
> boxes just decides to stop responding.
>
> Jim Westfall's firewire_tester program was a godsend.  Whenever one of
> the boxes would go to sleep, one or two shots of firewire_tester would
> bring it back to life.
>
> I figured that a good way to keep the DCT boxes alive was to run
> firewire_tester in cron.  The big problem was making sure Myth was not
> already streaming from the box.
>
> So I decided to write my first shell script to test whether the boxes
> were already busy, and if not, then to execute firewire_tester.
>
> I wanted one script that would run successfully on each of the three
> boxes.  In addition, I wanted it to be robust enough to determine
> which port connected to the DCT box (the assigned port may change on
> reboot).
>
> So the script, first gets the status report output in xml from the
> master backend (in order to determine which tuner is connected to this
> backend and whether it is busy).
>
> Then it runs plugreport to determine whether which port is active.
>
> Finally, it executes firewire_tester (if the tuner is not in use).
>
> I am posting the script here because it may be of use to people who
> are be experiencing the similar problems.  If you have your DCT boxes
> daisy-chained or if your node is not always zero, then you will need
> to tweak the script.  Otherwise, I believe it will work as it is for
> you.
>
> In addition, since this is my first shell script, I'd appreciate some
> constructive feedback on form.

you could also try running SVN, which has most of what firewire_tester
does built in (latest SVN build as of two days ago has worked really
well for me with two DCT's daisy chained) and uses the GUID for
identifying boxes, so no more port/node issues either.

-- 
Steve
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