Topics

1

Installation issues / PCHDTV-5500 not detected?

« on: December 10, 2009, 04:09:36 am »

I just got my 8.10b2 Core up and running, and everything on the core appears to be working as intended EXCEPT my HD tuner card is not being detected.  This card is a working pull from a previous Mythdora system, so I'm confident it is not bad.  Can anyone point me in the proper direction to debug this?

Thanks.

2

Installation issues / White screen after MD boots [SOLVED]

« on: December 10, 2009, 04:05:59 am »

I've seen all the posts about the black screen after installing.  This issue is a little different.

I have my core up and running, and I've plugged my first diskless MD into the switch and booted it PXE.  It's an older Toshiba laptop, P4-2.0 with Geforce 4 onboard graphics.  The machine boots, but when the AV wizard is supposed to come up, the entire LCD screen turns white, like every pixel slowly fades from black to white over about 5 seconds.

I've tried the number keys, and the machine responds with a little beep, then tosses me back out to the console for a couple seconds, then the screen goes black and begins fading to white again.

I believe this is a problem with the Nvidia driver, though I'm unclear how to diagnose or troubleshoot it without being able to see the screen.

For the record, there is nothing wrong with the laptop.  It has Fedora 12 on the hard drive and runs beautifully with the restricted driver enabled (96.x Legacy).  This is only a problem when booting the diskless image.

By the way, this is a 8.10b2 installation.

Please help?

3

Installation issues / Another "black screen after install" post, except different

« on: November 13, 2009, 01:35:30 am »

I searched the forums for information on the "black screen after reboot" problems.  What I see are 3-5 completely different problems, all being treated as the same 1 problem for which there is a fix.  But there really are several distinctly different descriptions in the threads, and I think a closer look is in order.

For example, I had no problem getting the AV Wizard to come up after reboot.  That is the 1 issue I see documented with an explanation and a fix.

My problem is that after the AV Wizard completes, the machine begins installing packages.  During this time I get a black screen with giant (30 point) font telling me package after package is being installed.  So I wait patiently and watch, but eventually the giant text stops showing up on the screen and the machine just sits idle with only a mouse cursor.  I've waited over an hour after this point and still nothing.

Now, the specific issue here is what should I be expecting?  What should I be doing at this point?  Documentation is not good after AV Wizard is complete, so new users (I had 7.10 for awhile) have no idea what should be going on.  Should I kill it and try rebooting?  Should I re-install?  Are there some logs of files I should be looking in?  Who knows.

My hardware (don't laugh, it's for testing the Beta) is an older Toshiba Laptop.  It's a P4 2.0 Ghz with 768MB of Ram, a 60GB hard drive, onboard sound, modem and NIC, and a PCMCIA NIC card added for the internal network.  It runs an Nvidia Geforce 4 mobile video card.  I like this as a test unit because it also has built-in Bluetooth and wireless (disabled at this time).  I don't believe there are any hardware problems with this machine.

So if someone could give me a push in the right direction, I'd appreciate it!

4

Users / Strange issue with web admin site

« on: February 03, 2009, 04:04:04 pm »

This is a brand-new installation that I'm in the process of configuring.

Everything about the web admin works perfectly except one page.  When I try to allow external access to the box, the page just sits there and tries to load until it times out.  If I refresh, the page comes right back but my settings haven't changed.  I have tried waiting for hours to see if it would eventually load, but it never does.  Anyone else come across this?  FYI the Firewall setting tab works fine, and I can open/forward ports without a problem, so I'm pretty sure this isn't a problem with the firewall.

Ideas?

5

Installation issues / Pulling my hair out after a weekend of failed attempts

« on: February 02, 2009, 04:53:53 pm »

OK, I went home from work on Friday and spent nearly the entire weekend trying to setup a LMCE network.  I wish I could say I was watching TV right now, but I'm not.

At a couple points, I actually had it installed and working, but I couldn't get any stability out of it.  Video was hanging intermittantly and network shares were only sometimes available, which I attributed to a bad NIC card.

I believe my problems are all hardware related so I've been working that side of the problem.  Everytime I make a major change I do a clean reinstall so everything is fresh.  As of this morning I still don't have a working CORE.  In fact, I'm stealing my neigbors WIFI to write this.

Here's where I've been:
First setup, Dual PIII 1.4 server with 1GB and GeForce 5200.  Onboard NIC for WAN, and added a pci NIC for LAN.  Added a Firewire card for 1TB external storage.  Also added a PVR-500 for TV and a USB 2.0 card for future upgrades.  This machine installed OK but I had to mess around with the network settings a lot to get things working.  Once it was up and running, the internal network keep dropping.  I tried 4 different brand NIC cards, (Linksys, 3Com, Realtek and Dlink) with the same results, and also tried swapping roles (LAN/WAN) without success.  I removed the USB and Firewire cards to debug IRQ conflicts, and swapped the NIC into every available PCI slot.  The best I ever acheived was buggy, inconsistant networking.  Many of my changes didn't even get that much.

So I got frustrated and started a new system.  Figured the above must have had a buggy motherboard or something.  The new system was an old machine a buddy gave me, completely different architecture.  It's a AMD Sempron 3000 on an Asus motherboard with 768MB of ram.  The nice thing is this machine has onboard SATA II, so I dropped in a brand new 500GB sata drive.  I disabled the primary IDE in the BIOS and installed a brand new DVD-RW on the secondary IDE as master.  I no longer need the PCI firewire or USB cards, as those ports are available on the backplane.  So the only cards I've added are an additional NIC, a GeForce 5200 AGP, and the PVR-500.  Pretty straigtforward right?

Nope.  This machine won't install.  I can't get the AV-Wizard screen to come up.  I'm using the VGA connector with a standard LCD monitor.  The install runs fine, reboots, first-run scripts run and networks are detected correctly, then right when the AV-Wiz is supposed to come up, black screen.  I tried swapping the 5200 for a 5500 with the same results.  (The 5200 is the same card used above which installed sucessfully several times)  I also ran memory test for 5 hours yesterday with all passes.  What is interesting is that if I reboot the machine, X will start and bring up the LMCE launch manager but it can't generate the on-screen orbiter. (Error about transparency manager not running)  I attribute this to it not completing the installation configuration.

I'm open to any ideas at this point.  I really want this to work, I love the idea if a single home server solution.  I could go back to my original setup which was a Clarkconnect gateway and a MythDora backend, but it's just more hardware to run, more shares to manage.  Give me a hand please!

-Jimmy

6

Installation issues / How to replace a bad NIC card?

« on: February 01, 2009, 07:46:29 pm »

I'm setting up a new core and finding I have some bugs to work out.  The biggest one relates to either a bad NIC card or a IRQ conflict between it and my PVR-500.  I say this because I can't get a quality link on the internal network.  Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not.  Often it drops as soon as the PVR-500 starts recording.  I tried swapping the cards around to different PCI slots and getting the IRQ to not overlap which helped, but the internal network was still on and off.  I have tried replacing the card but LMCE doesn't detect the hardware change and reconfigure the network accordingly. Is there a way for me to trigger this?

I did STF for this but the only somewhat relevant post was here http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=1327.0 and it really didn't help anyway.

For info her's the LSPCI ouput:

Code: [Select]

linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C693A/694x [Apollo PRO133x] (rev
 c4)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C598/694x [Apollo MVP3/Pro133x AG
P]
00:09.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
00:09.1 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
00:09.2 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev 02)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Davicom Semiconductor, Inc. 21x4x DEC-Tulip compati                                                 ble 10/100 Ethernet (rev 40)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: Hint Corp HB6 Universal PCI-PCI bridge (non-transparent mode                                                 ) (rev 11)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8231 [PCI-to-ISA Bridge] (rev 10)
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/                                                 C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller                                                  (rev 1e)
00:11.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller                                                  (rev 1e)
00:11.4 Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ACPI (rev 10)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio                                                  Controller (rev 40)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 51)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (re                                                 v a1)
02:08.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416)                                                  MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
02:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416)                                                  MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$
And the attempt to reconfigure...

Code: [Select]

linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ sudo /usr/pluto/bin/Network_Setup.sh
Writing network configuration with one in database
 * Deconfiguring network interfaces...
There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.eth1.pid with pid 4396
killed old client process, removed PID file
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.5
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/eth1/00:01:80:22:44:48
Sending on   LPF/eth1/00:01:80:22:44:48
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPRELEASE on eth1 to 68.114.36.82 port 67
                                                                         [ OK ]
 * Stopping DHCP server dhcpd3                                           [fail]
5707 Sun Feb  1 12:24:44 CST 2009 WaitLock 'PlutoDHCP' (PlutoDHCP_config)
5707 Sun Feb  1 12:24:44 CST 2009 WaitLock 'PlutoDHCP' (PlutoDHCP_config) succes
s
Device 1 has bad mac address
 * Stopping DHCP server dhcpd3                                           [fail]
 * Starting DHCP server dhcpd3                                           [fail]
invoke-rc.d: initscript dhcp3-server, action "restart" failed.
5707 Sun Feb  1 12:24:49 CST 2009 Unlock 'PlutoDHCP' (PlutoDHCP_config)
5707 Sun Feb  1 12:24:49 CST 2009 Unlock 'PlutoDHCP' (PlutoDHCP_config) success
 * Configuring network interfaces...
There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.eth1.pid with pid 134519120
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.5
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/eth1/00:01:80:22:44:48
Sending on   LPF/eth1/00:01:80:22:44:48
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPOFFER from 10.130.64.1
DHCPREQUEST on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 10.130.64.1
bound to 66.189.142.136 -- renewal in 1690 seconds.
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
Failed to bring up eth0.
                                                                         [ OK ]
 * Starting DHCP server dhcpd3                                           [fail]
invoke-rc.d: initscript dhcp3-server, action "start" failed.
server reload successful
 * Reloading /etc/samba/smb.conf...                                      [ OK ]
Setting NIS, with domain 'pluto'

At this point, we have to construct a list of the hosts which will run NIS
servers.  dcerouter is in the list of NIS server hosts.  Please continue to add
the names for the other hosts, one per line.  When you are done with the
list, type a <control D>.
        next host to add:  dcerouter
        next host to add:       next host to add:
The current list of NIS servers looks like this:

dcerouter


Is this correct?  [y/n: y]  We need a few minutes to build the databases...
Building /var/yp/pluto/ypservers...
Running /var/yp/Makefile...
make[1]: Entering directory `/var/yp/pluto'
Updating passwd.byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating pass
wd.byuid...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating grou
p.byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating grou
p.bygid...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating host
s.byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating host
s.byaddr...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating rpc.
byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating rpc.
bynumber...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating serv
ices.byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating serv
ices.byservicename...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating neti
d.byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating prot
ocols.bynumber...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating prot
ocols.byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating netg
roup...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating netg
roup.byhost...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating netg
roup.byuser...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredUpdating shad
ow.byname...
failed to send 'clear' to local ypserv: RPC: Program not registeredmake[1]: Leav
ing directory `/var/yp/pluto'

dcerouter has been set up as a NIS master server.

Now you can run ypinit -s dcerouter on all slave server.
 * Starting NIS services                                                 [ OK ]
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$

7

Installation issues / AV Wizard picking wrong audio output

« on: January 30, 2009, 05:57:59 pm »

I have a plethora of Compaq EVO desktops that will ultimately become MDs for my house.  They are all identical (which is nice) and testing has shown they all work flawlessly with LinuxMCE with one minor excetion.  When the AV Wizard comes up, it defaults sound to the internal PC Speaker rather than the 1/8" audio output.  I can see no way to change this behaviour, and I don't want to break any scripts.  I can see from the core admin site that the audio output is "analog stereo" but it's unclear how to set the MD to use the output rather than the internal speaker.

These Compaq Evos have the following specs:
PIII 1.4t processor
512MB ram
Onboard sound, nic, usb, and vga video (disabled)
I add in a Nvidia 5xxx or 6xxx PCI card with either vga or s-video output depending on TV

If there is any other information I can provide let me know.

8

Installation issues / Rebuilding my network with LinuxMCE this weekend, looking for advice

« on: January 30, 2009, 05:49:58 pm »

I already had LinuxMCE running a few months ago, but shelved it temporarily because I had some issues.  I'm not in the process of putting it back in, and am looking for some advice or guidance on the hardware and layout I'm working with.

First, I've already built and installed the Core.  I'm not opposed to re-doing it at this time if that should be required.  I mostly built it as a test-bed for my hardware to assure it was all going to work and be stable, which it is.  My Core is a PIII 1.4t with 512MB and a 40Gb drive.  I have (2) 3com PCI 10/100 server NIC cards in it, and a USB 2.0/firewire 400 pci card for plug-n-play storage.  This box is rock-solid stable and has been running for several days already.  I do not intend to put my tuner card in this box, nor do any transcoding.  This box is strictly intended to be the Core, and serve only those functions, so I think the modest hardware is doable.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

Now, the first MD has some more power.  It is a dual-cpu PIII 1.4 with 2GB and a 500GB IDE drive.  It also has the PVR-500 for TV recording.  (This was my MythTV backend server and it worked very well)  I would like this machine to perform all the heavy-lifting for MythTV and I would also like the internal drive to be available storage space for recordings.  This part I'm not sure will work, so I need help here.  It appears LMCE will not use the internal drive for storage if I net-boot it.  Any way around this?  What if I move the drive to the Core as a 2nd drive?  I'm open to ideas here, obviously the 40GB drive the core runs on is not going to cut it!

And last, I am concerned about LMCE spreading my stuff out all over the network.  It detects network shares (very nice) and asks if it can use them.  I'm hesitant to allow it for a couple reasons.  First, will LMCE use up too much available space and fill up the hard drive of a Windows box?  And second, if my stuff is spread out all over the network, what happens if one drive fails?  Or maybe even more common what if that Windows box is turned off?  Do I lose data or corrupt files?  How can I safely backup my media if it is spread out across 4 or 5 network shares?

Thanks in advance for your assitance.

BTW all my TV recording is Standard Def, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

9

Installation issues / Just completed my first install, and WOW am I impressed...

« on: November 11, 2008, 04:51:33 pm »

But I do have a few questions;

• How do I install the Media Director software locally so I don't have to boot from the PXE?  Or maybe I should be asking, is there a way to install the MD software locally?  Or better yet, SHOULD I install and run the MD software client locally?  The reason I'm asking is because the PXE boot is seriously slow, and the MD box is dedicated to this cause so their is no need to have another OS loaded on it.
• During the core install, I had two HDs in the system (originally was a Mythdora Backend server).  The primary was a 80GB drive, and the secondary was a 160GB drive.  In the original setup, they were pooled in an Logical Volume to get me about 200GB of Mythtv storage.  When L-MCE installed it reformatted the primary disk (breaking the LV) and left the second disk unformatted and unavailable.  I tried to fdisk it through KDE but it denied me (even as SU).  I'm not really a linux newbie anymore, but I'm much more familiar with Fedora than Unbuntu so I'm struggling with the nuances
• In my previous network, my router was a ClarkConnect box that was doing the DCHP and also serving MySQL and providing the Apache webserver for my web site.  The most important reason I love ClarkConnect was the content filter, which keeps the chilrens safe from the darkest parts of the internet.  Can L-MCE be configured to host my website AND add the content filter so I can get rid of the extra server?
• And last, the version of MythTV built in to L-MCE seems grossly out of date.  I was previsouly using Mythdora 5, which had MythTV 0.21 installed.  I haven't looked yet at which version is included yet, but it appears much older.  Is there a way to update MythTV to the newer release?  Also, is there a way to add some of the missing themes and plug-ins back into Myth? (The GANT theme is terrible, hurt my eyes!)

Sorry for the long winded message.  I do want to thank the group who develops this software.  You guys have done an AMAZING job.  I was stunned at the automation and intelligent scripting I saw during the install and configuration.  For a few years I've dreamed of something like this, but desipte my best efforts I was never able to do it.  I can't wait until I get home and show the wife the new setup!