Appearing/Disappearing Hard Drives

[gurumaia]

I think I finally got enough information on this to open up a thread and see if I can get some help. Here's a description of the issue I'm encountering:
On any MD, when I go Media > Video, only 1 out of my 2 hard drives appear at any time. And they switch back and forth.

Let's go a bit more in-depth about my setup:
I'm running 0810 final.
I have 1 core and 1 MD.
All HDDs are plugged in to the core internally.
There are 2 hard drives configured on the system (apart from the OS hdd).
sdb1 - 2TB SATA Hard Drive known as device #46. This device's name is "2000"
sdc1 - 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive known as device #45. This device's name is "1500"

The system switches between them every 2 minutes.
I've tracked this down to the UpdateMedia execution. Every time UpdateMedia is run, they switch places (i.e. 1500 disappears and 2000 appears).
Here is an interesting excerpt of the UpdateMedia execution log during which 2000 appears and 1500 disappears. http://pastebin.com/b1feFdQQ
In it you can see that it tries to re-use PK_File 7875 for 2000. I can confirm that, prior to this execution, this same record on the File table of the pluto_media db referred to the 1500 symlink and that it got updated to refer to 2000, thus leaving 1500 out of the db.

Without knowing how UpdateMedia works (or perhaps some other lmce component I'm not aware of), I feel like there's not much else I can do to find out what's going on here. It seems that it gets the information (PK_File 7875) from some sort of id3 file but I don't know how that works.
If someone could enlighten me on how this stuff works, perhaps I can find out what's going on.

Thanks in advance!
ps. I know I talked to some people on the IRC channel about this before but time is really tight right now so I figure maybe the forum is a more appropriate tool this time.

[brononius]

Hey,

I noticed a bit the same when I added a 1TB to my system.
My monitoring sees the disk mostly as 'down', and from time to time it was there.

For the moment I removed it again since i didn't trust the situation...
So I certainly will follow up this topic for the results...  

[gurumaia]

Hey,

I noticed a bit the same when I added a 1TB to my system.
My monitoring sees the disk mostly as 'down', and from time to time it was there.

For the moment I removed it again since i didn't trust the situation...
So I certainly will follow up this topic for the results...  

Hey Brononi, it seems to me we're having different problems. I guess I forgot to add an extremely important piece of information in my original post. The drives themselves are always mounted and available for direct access (i.e. via shell).
The problem lies in lmce's database not recognizing them even though they're working normally.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that the sdc1 drive is 100% empty. All it has is the lmce directory structure.
sdb1 on the other hand has all kinds of stuff in all kinds of naming schemes. But the files themselves all (at least the 100 or so that I manually checked) get recognized just fine. It's the symbolic link created at /home/public/data/videos that gets this odd behavior, thus making it impossible to navigate the system by filename through the orbiter.

Now, I know navigating by filename is not optimal but my media is not tagged as of yet and from what I can gather, for TV Shows it seems to be the only way to go. Since my TV Show recordings are nicely organized in their respective folder, navigating by filename is a breeze for me.

About your issue, did you test that drive on another system? Is it working properly?

[tschak909]

Please understand fellas, the hard drives are mounted AS NEEDED by autofs. The UpdateMedia system understands this, and it continually scans the connected filesystems, so you'll see the disks periodically mount and unmount.

-Thom

[gurumaia]

Please understand fellas, the hard drives are mounted AS NEEDED by autofs. The UpdateMedia system understands this, and it continually scans the connected filesystems, so you'll see the disks periodically mount and unmount.

-Thom

Yes, this was explained to me by l3top on IRC the other day. That's not the issue here as there is no problem accessing the drives via shell. What is going on is that the symbolic links that point to the correct directory in the drive do not appear on the orbiter and are in fact missing from the database. Every time UpdateMedia runs, it updates PK_File 7875 from the File table to point to either one of the two hdds.

[brononius]

Please understand fellas, the hard drives are mounted AS NEEDED by autofs. The UpdateMedia system understands this, and it continually scans the connected filesystems, so you'll see the disks periodically mount and unmount.
-Thom

Explains a lot. No, wait. Explains everything...

At least for my situation...
Thanks!

[tschak909]

and no, do not attempt to statically mount your disks, or circumvent this system. No. Just. No. Don't. You will break everything.

-Thom

[gurumaia]

Just to let everybody know, installing 1004 did nothing to resolve the issue. After adding the drives to lmce, they continued with the same behavior of appearing/disappearing from all orbiters.
Then I figured maybe if I formatted them as ext3, it would make a difference. I proceeded to format 2 out of the 3 drives and that seems to have resolved my issue. I don't know exactly why them being in xfs gave me troubles, but this is what solved it for me.
Thanks for the help.