No Guide Data (Downloaded but not used)

Channels Apple TV Troubleshooting
#1

Using just OTA programming with two HDHomeRun quad tuners in my system.

I had to reinstall everything on the Linux system where my Channels DVR resides. I reinstalled Channels and got things up and running as they should. Then, after a few days, while no recordings were being made (about 3 AM this morning), I shut down the computer (with shutdown -h now, so it would be a clean shutdown) and moved it to another room and rebooted. Everything was okay, including guide data.

Then I looked a little while ago and saw there was no guide data. So I went to Settings and picked "Refresh guide updates." No joy. Tried "Re-download entire guide." Still nothing. So I tried "Delete and recreate database." Still nada. Each time I would check On Now, Guide, and DVR. Nothing on the guides, just the stations listed and no programming. No "Up next" in the DVR.

Even after trying all three actions, I could still see, "Last refreshed 16 minutes ago" by the control to download the guide. It's like it has no idea it's just been refreshed.

And, of course, Channels has now missed most of a Sunday of recording.

#2

What does the Log tab show? Are there errors shown about guide data?

#3

I found errors for early today - very early, while things seemed to be working. (I was up all night working on another issue, so I was at the computer, with this on in the background at the time.)

2020/03/15 05:48:56.966675 [SYS] Error checking for update: Get https://channels-dvr.s3.amazonaws.com/latest.json: dial tcp: lookup channels-dvr.s3.amazonaws.com on 192.168.1.1:53: read udp 192.168.1.104:35012->192.168.1.1:53: i/o timeout

But, more recently, when I tried to update, I got this - there's more, of course, but it's all the same until the last two entries:

2020/03/15 17:29:29.303990 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 2 stations in USA-OTA23838 @ 2020-03-30 11:00PM
2020/03/15 17:29:29.622790 [DVR] indexed 19 airings (2 channels) [0s fetch, 0s index]
2020/03/15 17:29:29.626310 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 2 stations in USA-OTA23838 @ 2020-03-31 5:00AM
2020/03/15 17:29:29.942752 [DVR] indexed 21 airings (2 channels) [0s fetch, 0s index]
2020/03/15 17:29:29.943930 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 2 stations in USA-OTA23838 @ 2020-03-31 11:00AM
2020/03/15 17:29:30.308902 [DVR] indexed 15 airings (2 channels) [0s fetch, 0s index]
2020/03/15 17:29:30.311500 [IDX] Pruned 0 expired groups from USA-OTA23838 in 389.91µs.
2020/03/15 17:29:30.314827 [IDX] Pruned 0 expired airings from USA-OTA23838 in 770.703µs.

#4

Your Channels computer is asking your router for DNS information, and it's getting no response. Try rebooting your router, or at least restarting the DNS service on your gateway.

#5

Only two channels are being downloaded. Below your HDHR on the main settings tab, how many channels are listed?

#6

@racameron: At the time I was making changes to the firewall, which was early this morning. Since then, it's been connecting okay.

#7

@tmm1: On the HDHR itself, there are 27 channels listed. On the settings tab for the HDHRs, I get this:

19%20PM
Screen Shot 2020-03-15 at 6.16.19 PM.png731×232 28.5 KB

#8

Did you realize your HDHR tuners are on a different network than your server and router?
HDHR's on network 172.16/12
Router and Channels DVR Server on network 192.168/16

#9

Can you try restarting the dvr server software?

#10

They were at that time. I had to reset my firewall this morning to factory defaults. When I did that, it came back up as 192.168.1.1 and I had to deal with that until I could change the firewall/DHCP/DNS server back to the subnet I normally use.

#11

@tmm1: I was going to, but I don't know how to restart Channels on Linux. Or do you mean reboot the server?

#12

systemctl restart channels-dvr

#13

That did it.

Any idea what was going on? I'll note the restart command. (I checked for /etc/init.d/channels and, of course, it wasn't there.)

#14

If your system uses systemd, then the service unit is installed as /etc/systemd/system/channels-dvr.service.

#15

Argh!

I last used Linux for anything other than just messing around in about 2008 or 2009. Then I come back to it now, or a couple months ago, and have to deal with the whole new systemd thing.

Old habits die hard and, at that time, everything I need to start or stop or restart was in /etc/init.d. Guess I gotta learn new ways.