Hi All

Any tips here? I might just be doing something silly. When I open the web browser from my onscreen orbiter in 10.04 (UI2-medium), I can use my remote (wiimote) to "click" anywhere with no problem but when I want to type something and I bring up the onscreen keyboard, the keystrokes don't end up in the browser window, even though the keyboard registers the presses (the key highlights when it gets clicked on).

I tried, for example, filling in the address bar as follows:

you can click in the address bar and the cursor appears there, but then when you click on the onscreen keyboard keys, no letters appear in the address bar. A bit as though the focus has been lost.

Anyone else have these problems?

1. yes

OK, then, in a sense it is working because there was something that needed to be fixed-> the samba shares. When that was fixed, it all started working again. In fact, thinking through it now, if we did communicate the value across and the samba connection was problematic, then the drive would have been switched online and offline constantly while there was a samba issue - the script on the core would have kept marking it online and then the script on the MD would have been setting it offline when it couldn't access the share.

It seems to me that online/offline in this case means different things depending on your perspective! If you're on the core (or, more significantly hybrid) then the drive is, for all intents and purposes, online. However, if you're on the media director, because you can't access the samba share, it is offline. So online/offline is sort of relative to your context.

2. If we intend to keep this caching mechanism, then we need to propagate this value to other media directors... perhaps this is silly, and it should just be removed...how much does this impact performance, I wonder?

Performance-wise I would imagine it would make a difference.... how much, though, could be tricky to determine.

Ironically, despite the logic seeming flawed, the behaviour is actually doing the right thing at the moment ;-)

I'll give it some more thought, thanks for the feedback.

Hi guys

As a result of my issues with my 2nd media drive in a related thread, I got to looking at the StorageDevices_StatusRadar.sh script and I have a question-

Regarding the use of the CacheSet and CacheGet function. I see that this is used to "remember" the online flag of a storage device, the last time the script polled the devices. This makes sense because it means that the script doesn't have to query the database every time to get this value... it only has to do that the first time the script polls and there is no stored value.

However, where this logic appears to fall down is that the script will often be running on more than one machine on the LMCE network (all mediadirectors and the core) and since the scripts don't share the cached value(s), they can't know if another script has changed the flag or not because they never re-check the database. This is exactly what happened in my case- When the core started the StorageDevices_StatusRadar script, my media drive was (correctly) marked online as a local, mountable drive. The value was cached and as far as the core instance of the script was concerned it stayed that way.

Then when a media director started up, it ran the same script locally, but this time it determined that the media drive was not online because it couldn't access the samba share (another issue) so it marked the device as offline in the database.

So now there was a situation where the two scripts carried on merrily "polling" every few seconds and remembering the status of the same device differently. I'm not even sure which was right in the end because, granted, the samba share wasn't available, but the drive was still accessible-> I could still *play* the videos... I just couldn't see them in the datagrid, so as far as I was concerned it was online.

In summary-

1. "Should" the media director consider the media drive to be offline if it can't access it as a samba share?
2. Does it make sense that the script runs on each machine and "remembers" a flag for the same device that is not shared between them? What are the alternatives?

Any thoughts/ comments?

Solved! Yay, it was an SMB problem (at least secondarily). I have sorted out my samba shares as per thread below and now my videos are listing no-problem.

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,12739.msg91347.html#msg91347

Viking... since you started this thread and I hijacked it and now both of our video lists are available to us, can I trouble you to mark the thread as [solved]?

Many thanks.

I am going to open a new thread in developers to query the brains of the mighty about the statusradar script whose logic I believe to be confusing to my little brain.

Woohoo.... seem to have solved my samba problem. Will update wiki(s) as well in a moment.

A few tips....

1. I'm assuming that sambacredentials -
/usr/pluto/var/sambaCredentials.secret
should be the same across all MDs. I have made sure mine are and so far so good.

2. The SAMBA (SMBD) that is installed and setup on 10.04 appears to not use /etc/samba/smbpasswd file for its users and passwords despite the fact that this file is created. It appears to use a newer authentication scheme. To add/remove/delete/list SAMBA users you need to use the pdbedit command.

Code:

dcerouter#> sudo pdbedit -L -v
lists all samba users

dcerouter#> sudo pdbedit -a -u sambahelper
Enter password:

Allows you to set the password for sambahelper.

I did this on dcerouter and set it to the password listed in the credentials file(s) for sambahelper and since my video list is now showing despite reboots and restarts of all mds, I presume the statusradar script (see related post) is now able to query the samba shares. Yay.

Edit: Stupid idiot, sorry guys-> not "pbedit", "pdbedit'. Thanks for picking that up, bushtech.

Related to my post here:

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,12721.msg91271.html#msg91271

I haven't fiddled with Samba previously because I don't have windows machines on my network officially.... but now I'm having to understand it because it may be at the bottom of my media drive being marked offline (see above post).

My question is-

The credentials that can be found in the file:

/usr/pluto/var/sambaCredentials.secret

Which appear to be used to mount smb shares across the various MDs and the core, in my system, appear to differ at least between the core and one of my MDs. Is this normal? Is the password randomly generated at install time and differs for each MD or should these all be the same password?

I'm just wondering if the differences mean I have a problem with my installation or if they're to be expected.

OK, I'm getting somewhere on my side. I discovered StorageDevices_StatusRadar.sh which runs on all MDs and the core and, among other things, sets drives on or offline.

It doesn't log by default so I set it to log and discovered the following.

On the core, the log reads:

Code:

Sun Aug  5 18:54:54 SAST 2012 ----------------- DEVICE 37 1
Sun Aug  5 18:55:00 SAST 2012 ----------------- DEVICE 37 1 (unchanged)
Sun Aug  5 18:55:05 SAST 2012 ----------------- DEVICE 37 1 (unchanged)
Sun Aug  5 18:55:11 SAST 2012 ----------------- DEVICE 37 1 (unchanged)

Weird.... so the core sets the drive online when it starts up the script and thinks it is still online the whole time. Which is not surprising because the code doesn't actually check the drive status each time via the database... it just checks what it was set to last time. Which is fine if last time it was set, it was set from this script.... but what if it was set somewhere else... like the same script on one of the MDs....

So I got one of my moons logging, which revealed:

Code:

un Aug  5 20:27:27 SAST 2012 Drive 37 (debb5bd0-682a-4ec4-8bd2-75a66b2678ae) is not advertised by it's parent smb server (192.168.80.1)
Sun Aug  5 20:27:29 SAST 2012 ----------------- DEVICE 37 0
Sun Aug  5 20:27:35 SAST 2012 Drive 37 (debb5bd0-682a-4ec4-8bd2-75a66b2678ae) is not advertised by it's parent smb server (192.168.80.1)
Sun Aug  5 20:27:35 SAST 2012 ----------------- DEVICE 37 0 (unchanged)
Sun Aug  5 20:27:40 SAST 2012 Drive 37 (debb5bd0-682a-4ec4-8bd2-75a66b2678ae) is not advertised by it's parent smb server (192.168.80.1)
Sun Aug  5 20:27:40 SAST 2012 ----------------- DEVICE 37 0 (unchanged)
.
.

Aha.... so when the MD starts up, it sets the drive OFFLINE because it can't connect to a samba share.

So on the moon I try

Code:

root@moon22:/var/log/pluto# smbclient -A /usr/pluto/var/sambaCredentials.secret --list=//192.168.80.1 --grepable
session setup failed: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE

So I guess it is a SMB problem?

Updated the script on my core and restarted the machine. My media driver working fine so far except that it still goes offline whenever I restart a media director... hmm. Was sort of hoping the updated radar script might help but maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=12721

Hi,

Not sure if this is related...

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,11615.0.html

I could search for movies and find them but under videos all was blank.

Hope this helps.

No, thanks for the idea but I'm pretty sure it's not that. I've fiddled with all the sort by settings and the movies don't appear at all but you can make them appear by marking the drive online in the webadmin. Something is setting the drive to offline occasionally.

Definitely not resolved. To confirm behaviour- I can get to a movie by doing a "search" and typing any letter on the screen and then I can select it and play it fine but none displayed in the default grid/list when I pop up movies from the media menu.

It seems to be, as stated, the drive being marked as offline everytime a media director starts up. In other words, after manually marking the drive as "online" in the webadmin device details, the movies all appear. Then, shutting down any of the MDs doesn't affect it but as soon as one of them starts up, it disappears again.

I'll search for the ticket because Thom mentioned earlier this had been resolved. Perhaps that'll give me some clues.

Edit: Couldn't find the ticket. Next step, I'll watch the logs when starting an MD and see if I can pick up the event that is causing the drive to go offline.

And you did do an :

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

first on the core and then on the MD ?
Not sure if necessary, but shutdown and rebooted everyting after that. Only the MythTV crashing problem was then there. Did not yet have time to try the fix for that.

Not exactly, I used L3mce's global_upgrades script which is a pretty neat alternative and I think it does practically the same thing. However, I did not shut down the core after that I think so perhaps I'll do that. Shut it down, un plug it, count to 10 and stuff. Kind of a windows approach but worth a shot ;-)

Will report back.

Same story for me- my second (media) drive has the "online" checkbox in its device data section unchecked. Once I check it, the media is available again. How can I get this setting to be persistent. I've done a global upgrade but that doesn't seem to have resolved it. Any ideas? Also not sure if shutting down an MD is what causes it to become unchecked.... will test that now.

Yup, that's it. I shut down one of the media directors and, when it starts again, it seems to take the drive (on the core) offline for some reason?

Did a clean install and the hdd was picked up when setting up first media director so all sorted. Not sure if this has been resolved or not (if you add one later) but certainly on clean install (core-only) it seems to work fine.

Am having similar issue with empty video list, snapshot 20120716081426238.  But I will try the upgrade script tonight and see if it sorts it out as well as filling in the snapshot details.

Running upgrade script now...

PS, just want to say again that the latest installers are so sweet. Installing was an absolute breeze.

Not exactly sure... messing about with the scripts and SQL commands and I think the device tree is a bit poked. My Lounge MD has become a hybrid (at least in description) and a few other strange things.... it's running but I suspect on reboot things will tank so I've backed up a couple of scripts and things I was working on as well as taken some screenshots of some of the config that was a schlepp (camera and events setup) so I can get up and running again easily.

The system has had a lot of hacking as I've tried to work on various things and I'm not sure I've always cleaned up after myself ;-)

Must say, I'm not averse to re-installing, esp with 10-04 that's changing so fast and the installer getting better and better. It will be good to see if all the fixes for my hardware are in and working out of the box. I'll probably go for core-only again and it will be interesting to see if I hit the same issues with the 2nd hdd. Of course it will probably be in the machine to start with so not quite the same scenario but we shall see what happens.

Will probably leave the system running until I have the snapshot downloaded so I can still use it.