External disks and OSX

Channels DVR Server
#1

Hi all,

a couple of times now i’ve noticed my DVR not recording new shows. when i check the log, i see that channels DVR can not create directories on the external disk. further investigation reveals that for some reason the external disk has been remounted as “/Volumes/ext 1” (when it should of course be “/Volumes/ext”)

this could be due to a hardware issue, but i do know that appending " 1", " 2", etc. is how OSX handles mounting multiple external disks with the same name…

i guess my question is, is there anything the DVR application can do to detect this condition, or is it inappropriate to work around this at the application level? or, maybe the DVR could send an email or some kind of notification that it’s unable to record? that might be the best option. is there any way to hook in a script on recording failure? for instance i could use pushover to alert me to any error conditions in the DVR (disk full, disk missing, etc.)

thanks,

rob

#2

This is a known issue that should be fixed in the next release. What happens is basically a race condition between the disk mount and the DVR booting up. On boot, the DVR will create a new Backups directory to snapshot the recordings database. If the external disk has not been mounted yet, it ends up creating a /Volumes/ext in the process. Then, when the disk goes to mount it sees that directory already exists and mounts at /Volumes/ext 1 instead.

I’ve fixed the DVR to stop blindly creating the directory if it doesn’t exist.

#3

ah, ok. sorry for the double post then. i just assumed the problem was with my hardware, since it is somewhat janky. i have definitely seen leftover mountpoints on other macs so i didn’t tie it to channels itself.

thanks

rob

p.s. some kind of notification system would still be useful… or, even if only the client could warn the user that something’s wrong with the backend, that might be good enough.