5 replies to this topic

[belbo]

Hi all

I've switched over to Arch from Ubuntu in the last 2 weeks or so. Enjoying it so far. One of the few remaining problems I have is that mythbackend is not logging. Have struggled to find any posts re this on google so any help would be appreciated.

I have a mythbackend.log file as the backend must have been logging shortly after I set up Arch but for some reason has stopped. My frontend was not logging etiher at one point but I have sorted that and it is logging fine now.

See this for location, names, dates and permissions of the log files -

ls -l /var/log/mythtv/
total 4348
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4345 Dec 14 08:09 mythbackend.log
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4431787 Dec 21 13:28 mythfrontend.log

The backend starts when I boot

I have a combined front/backend with gnome and auto login.

/etc/rc.conf file contains the following daemons line

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng dbus gdm network netfs crond dbus alsa sshd samba mysqld lircd httpd)

With the frontend I only got logging after specifying the log flag in my launcher and in the appswitch.pl launch script, like so -

my ($MYTHTV)="/usr/bin/mythfrontend -l /var/log/mythtv/mythfrontend.log"; #Process name to start

Any help greatly appreciated, as usual.

belbo

[belbo]

Marked as solved.

Silly me.

I wasn't sure how the backend was starting (or should be started). I think in Ubuntu it all happened automagically.

A bit more thinking about this and directed googling and I realised I needed to actually do something in Arch to get the backend to start on boot (eg adding to the daemons line in /etc/rc.conf) and that I had actually done so - ie I had added mythbackend to startup programs in gnome but simply with the command 'mythbackend'. I'm pretty sure that if I specify the command as 'mythbackend -l /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log' then it will log to that file in future. I have just stopped mythbackend and restarted it with the -l flag and it seems to be logging.

Will advise if it doesn't work on startup, but expect that it will.

belbo

[arkay]

belbo,

So are you starting it from gnome or rc.conf? Cause the former is the wrong way and the latter is correct.

You do need to set an environment variable in rc.conf for the myth startup script to work correctly.

As an FYI all the things that get called in the rc.conf DAEMONS line on boot just causes the init process to run the scripts in /etc/rc.d.

So starting/stopping myth manually is done with:

/etc/rc.d/mythbackend stop
/etc/rc.d/mythbackend start

or

/etc/rc.d/mythbackend restart

That script is already set up to start logging for mythbackend into /var/log.

So you don't need to do any of that -l stuff

Have a read of the script(s) in /etc/rc.d to see how they work and what they do.

Cheers,

Arkay

[belbo]

Arkay

Thanks once again for the help. I didn't know this and did it the wrong way - with gnome. Will correct now. This is obviously what Arch is all about - ie learning what is going on.

Presumably this approach applies to services that are started as daemons.
Is there a correct / better way to start the frontend with logging? At the moment I get it to start it with logging by having it with the -l flag in my gnome desktop launcher and in appswitch.pl.

cheers

belbo

[arkay]

belbo,

You can start the frontend that way but I think it's better the way you have it as the frontend isn't really a daemon that runs continuously all the time. i.e You stop it and start it via appswitch etc so I'd leave it as is.

I don't bother with frontend logging at all. If I ever need to see what's going on I just start a terminal and run mythfrontend from there, all the logging information will then go to the terminal so I can collect it, analyse it, post it etc etc.

Cheers,

Arkay.

[belbo]

Thanks once again Arkay. Good to know.