[mythtv-users] E-mail notices on HDPVR crap-out?

Tree junk at chassit.com
Fri Jul 30 11:48:15 UTC 2010



On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, steve wrote:

> Greetings.  I've got my MythTV set up with a Hauppauge HDPVR.  It
> periodically craps-out and needs to be restarted.  Yesterday I missed some
> recordings I really wanted before I discovered it had crashed.   So I'm
> wondering if there's any way to notify myself when this happens.  I'm pretty
> sure there's nothing built in to MythTV for this purpose, so I'm wondering
> if I might be able to write an external app to check it periodically--or to
> check with MythTV--to see if it's operational and, say, send myself an email
> if it's not.  Any ideas appreciated.

I use a package called logcheck for this.

Configuring it is a bit of a pain... lots of regexes, and you generally 
filter things out rather than just list what you are interested in.

You could also just have a script run from cron that greps for some 
failure string in the mythbackend.log file and sends mail to you if it is 
there. There are generally log messages about recordings failing. 
Fortunately, my HD-PVR hasn't failed in the last week, so I don't have an 
example message. (logs have rolled)

The downside of the simple grep + email is that it wouldn't reset... you'd 
keep getting emails for old failures. Once you get into the territory of 
tracking the file length, etc, you may be better off with a pre-built 
package like logcheck. There may be similar packages that are easier to 
configure for a single file...

-Tree




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