Plugin: SageAlert

[zzmystique]

Originally Posted by Slugger

For systems I monitor at work, I've used Nagios in the past with good success. I know it doesn't run on Windows, but if you have a Linux box on your LAN, I believe it will monitor Windows machines (but the nagios server itself runs on Linux).

I use NAGIOS at work to monitor the SJQ service, sagetv service and dvbe4sage, diskspace etc... What other monitoring have you got configured and would be willing to share the config?

Thanks
Anne

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by eric3a

I don't know if that would work.

When my units lock-up (still hesitating to use a past tense after 2 weeks without doing so and counting!) I HAD to reset them via power off/on and simply disabling /re-enabling USB port was rarely the solution.
If you can solve your lock-ups manually with disabling/enabling your USB port, then it might be the solution for you.

I travel a fair amount so I already had installed a remotely controlled power strip a while back anyway. Finding out I could use it programmatically to solve HDPVR lock-ups was just icing on the cake.

Eric

I read that one person had discovered that reconnecting the USB had the same effect as resetting the power. So that is where I got the idea, but I can not test because with the 1.0.5.301 drivers I have had zero lock ups.

I am thinking about adding a second HD-PVR, so we will see if the HD-PVR stays stable...

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by zzmystique

I use NAGIOS at work to monitor the SJQ service, sagetv service and dvbe4sage, diskspace etc... What other monitoring have you got configured and would be willing to share the config?

Thanks
Anne

Mostly it monitors network throughput, server load (CPU, etc.), a DB2 server (uptime, load, perf, etc.), Apache, Tomcat, some internal tools, etc. Along with pinging various (less important) network hosts to ensure they're up and alive.

Unfortunately, I can't share work product without going through a bunch of hoops, red tape, and so on. However, I think Google will provide at least the basis for most of the monitoring tests I've described above (except our DB2 monitor, which is quite involved and is mostly customized).

[eric3a]

So that is where I got the idea, but I can not test because with the 1.0.5.301 drivers I have had zero lock ups.

That is the best outcome!

Same thing happened to me, but I'm happy that I got to play and create the scripts before my downgrade to 1.0.5.301. It was fun to learn to do that and I now have belt and braces.

Eric

[zzmystique]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Unfortunately, I can't share work product without going through a bunch of hoops, red tape, and so on. However, I think Google will provide at least the basis for most of the monitoring tests I've described above (except our DB2 monitor, which is quite involved and is mostly customized).

Sorry didn't explain myself very well, I was wondering if you had written sagetv specific stuff for nagios or plugins for sagealert that would write the info, errors and warnings to the event logs that Nagios could then pick up.

I've been plagued with losing EPG data recently and would like some way of detecting it quickly..

Thanks

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by zzmystique

Sorry didn't explain myself very well, I was wondering if you had written sagetv specific stuff for nagios or plugins for sagealert that would write the info, errors and warnings to the event logs that Nagios could then pick up.

I've been plagued with losing EPG data recently and would like some way of detecting it quickly..

Thanks

Ah... no, I only use nagios at work and don't use it at all for sage stuff.

[koan00]

Are there any upgrade instructions for the 1.0.1 release?

Can I just unzip the new files and restart sage, or will my configuration settings be lost?

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by koan00

Are there any upgrade instructions for the 1.0.1 release?

Can I just unzip the new files and restart sage, or will my configuration settings be lost?

Shouldn't even need to have to restart Sage. Just unzip the package over the old one, Jetty should automatically detect the new package and upgrade automatically while SageTV is running. Settings will not be lost during the upgrade process (just don't delete the sagealert.sqlite db file).

[Slugger]

Starting with SageAlert v1.0.2, I have repackaged the application such that it relies on the commons-logging-1.1.1 jar files being installed to the SageTV/JARs folder. However, SageTV ships with commons-logging v1.0 (installed in the JARs folder as commons-logging.jar and commons-logging-api.jar). Therefore, to use SageAlert v1.0.2 or newer, you must upgrade SageTV's commons-logging jar files. I have written a wiki doc that explains the steps to do it (quite simple, actually).

The need to do all of this arose from an SRE user who was encountering ClassLoader problems. Turns out commons-logging prior to v1.1 is the root cause of the problem along with the fact that I was packaging the core commons-logging libs in my war files and they were also shipped with Sage in the JARs folder, causing additional collisions.

I have opened a bug report with SageTV asking them to upgrade the commons-logging packages themselves in a future release. Until that happens, you will need to manually upgrade the libraries. I have performed this upgrade myself and it has caused no ill effects (and the SRE user who hit the ClassLoader problems has also done it with no ill effects and it also got SRE working again). However, I feel obligated to warn people that changing these libs from the ones shipped with Sage could cause undesired results so if you are unsure about doing this then simply don't do it. If you choose not to then you cannot use SageAlert v1.0.2 or newer as it depends on the upgraded jars being in the SageTV/JARs folder.

SageAlert v1.0.2.749 (snapshot 749) is now available. This snapshot contains no functional changes vs. v1.0.1. The only change is that it's repackaged to properly support the use of the commons-logging-1.1.1 jars in the SageTV/JARs folder.

[superdodge]

I can't get any Viewing Notifications because all of my clients appear as an IP address in the SageAlert UI.

This includes the server itself which appears as the loopback address of 127.0.0.1

Is there something I need to do so these do not show up as IP address?

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by superdodge

Is there something I need to do so these do not show up as IP address?

use an hd200 ... slugger will have to correct me if im wrong but i dont think sagealert supports viewing notifications for PC Clients. extender (Hd100, Hd200) clients should work fine

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

use an hd200 ... slugger will have to correct me if im wrong but i dont think sagealert supports viewing notifications for PC Clients. extender (Hd100, Hd200) clients should work fine

Absolutely correct. This is a limitation of the SageTV API. A SageTV server cannot gain details about what a client is doing. All we can gather from the API is that a client is connected and nothing more. A server, on the other hand, can query the exact details of what all of the connected extenders (and placeshifters) are doing, which is why I can offer viewing notifications, etc. for extenders and placeshifters, but not for PC clients. I was going to originally add support for this by requiring installation of the remote API plugin on clients and then getting all the required info that way, but it was a lot of work and since I'm a 100% HD200/HD100 household, the extra work really didn't appeal to me since there was zero benefit in it for me.

If the SageTV v7.0 API were to provide access to PC client details like it does with extenders then I'd probably add in the support for PC client viewing notifications in a future release, otherwise the feature won't be happening.

[Slugger]

Just to finish my thought... the server also shows up by IP because (correct me if I'm wrong) you're running the SageTV service and run the GUI separately on your server. If you did not run the server as a service then viewing notifications would work for the server-client, but they can never work for external PC clients on the LAN (unless someone were to make an offer I couldn't refuse But given the work involved to make it happen and the fact that I personally have absolutely no use for the feature, I highly doubt such an offer exists).

[superdodge]

OK, thanks for the explanation. I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed that the 7.0 API will provide this functionality and that you'll be kind enough to code it in for those of us that don't use extenders. I guess I never realized how many people use HD200/HD100s.

I use my server to also display in my living room and a Mac Mini with SageTV Client to display in my Bedroom.

Thanks anyway. SageAlert is a great addition to my setup.

-RL

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by eric3a

Sure.

The main part is a remotely controllable power strip. I have one of these.
It can be controlled via a web interface or a command line program.

Run SageAlert (no fiuher intro needed!).
Run Growler for Windows. See here.
I run Growler on the same machine as SageTV and SageAlert so SageAlert connects to growler on 127.0.0.1

Get Scripty, a display method for Growler here. (bottom of the page).

Now set up SageAlert to send the ERRORS you want to Growler, and setup Growler to display them using Scripty as the display.
Scripty comes with a sample bat file which will extract the type of message, title, description of the error and a few other bits of info.
I was only concerned with the description so my bat file is:



As you see fairly simple.
HDPVR1.bat and HDPVR2.bat are 1 liner bat files that cycle each unit, using the command line interface from my remotely controllable power strip.



Renamer.bat is also very simple file which renames the Scripty bat file for 5 minutes so it becomes inaccessible to SageAlert/Growler for that period of time to avoid an infinite loop.



Wait is a classic one:


That's it!
The sad part is it took me the best part of an afternoon to get it going. In my defense the testing is slow once you get to actual testing as it takes minutes every time you crash an HDPVR on purpose.

I hope this helps.
If any one sees way to make this cleaner/faster/better, I'm game!

In particular a way to positively identify each tuner when one is called:
"Hauppauge HD PVR Capture Device Component"
and the other one:
"Hauppauge HD PVR Capture Device #2 Component"
I can only figure a way to negatively recognize the first, as not being the second.
Maybe counting the number of characters between quotes?

Eric

I am trying to set this up.

I have scripty_sample.bat working fine when I double click it from the C:\Program Files\Growl for Windows\Displays\Scripty\ directory.

But when growl has scripty call this .bat, it completes with two errors
"The system cannot find the file specified"
"The system cannot find the file specified"

The two methods are both opening a "C:\Windows\System32\Cmd.exe' window, and both call the HDPVRcycle.bat, the only difference is the error messages and
"rename" is not being performed when the errors occur.

My thinking is that it is the difference between a local user and a service calling the .bat

I tried to change the location of scripty_sample.bat to C:\Windows\System32\ but growl will not let me edit the location of the bat.

Suggestions please...

[eric3a]

I'm traveling so VNC back to my server to read my scripts would be a little slow and cumbersome. I will be back home each week-end, but will spend a lot of time on long trips, so not sure when i can really dig in.

From memory though, I changed the Growl install path from its default to "...\growl\" rather than "growl for windows".
Maybe some of my scripts call other scripts within the "growl" directory, which you don't have?

I suggest you run the script line by line to see where it plonks out. It probably is something silly like a wrong file name or folder name. I seem to recall I hard coded the full directory structure of any file I called from within a bat file to make sure things would work, but of course if your folder structure is slightly different it'll break.

One problem with the way I set things up is that it is probably needlessly complicated: bat files calling bat files, etc... It's just the way things came out, and I got too lazy to re-write something more elegant at the end.

I haven't had one HDPVR failure since October last year when I downgraded to the 1.0.53 drivers!! So my scripts sit there unused: the best outcome!
Eric

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by eric3a

I'm traveling so VNC back to my server to read my scripts would be a little slow and cumbersome. I will be back home each week-end, but will spend a lot of time on long trips, so not sure when i can really dig in.

From memory though, I changed the Growl install path from its default to "...\growl\" rather than "growl for windows".
Maybe some of my scripts call other scripts within the "growl" directory, which you don't have?

I suggest you run the script line by line to see where it plonks out. It probably is something silly like a wrong file name or folder name. I seem to recall I hard coded the full directory structure of any file I called from within a bat file to make sure things would work, but of course if your folder structure is slightly different it'll break.

One problem with the way I set things up is that it is probably needlessly complicated: bat files calling bat files, etc... It's just the way things came out, and I got too lazy to re-write something more elegant at the end.

I haven't had one HDPVR failure since October last year when I downgraded to the 1.0.53 drivers!! So my scripts sit there unused: the best outcome!
Eric

How do I "hard coded the full directory structure of any file I called from within a bat file to make sure things would work".

I tried "call C:\Program Files\Growl for Windows|Displays\Scripty\renamer.bat" but that errors with "call C:\Program is not an internal or external command".

[jerryt]

In these two expressions;
echo %1 %2>> growler.log
echo %date% %time% Recycling HDPVR2>> growler.log

How would I hard code the directory structure to growler.log?

[jerryt]

I got everything running (not tested completely).

I had to add
"CD C:\Program Files\Growl for Windows\Displays\Scripty"
as the fiirst line in "Rename.bat"

I broke the five minute wait somehow? I edited out "300" and it renames back in like a second.

Where do I put the 300 again?

[Slugger]

To edit that value in sjqc.properties would require you to stop the task client, edit the value, then restart the task client. That value is only read once at startup by the task client then is used from memory after that.