Found my Gremlin causing computer to Freeze

[zehd]

My XP box is very stable. About the only time I have to reboot is for updates and when I shut it down to fiddle with hardware. It runs GB-PVR and I use for normal everyday stuff, too.

Why do you feel a daily reboot is necessary? I suppose it can't hurt but it seems like overkill to me.

I had a FreeBSD box, an old HP 486 system, that ran over 400 days, according to uptime. We had to shut it down to move it across the computer room. It ran as an smtp server.

I also had a Sun Sparc box in my office that showed over 600 days in uptime. Again, I had to shut it down to move it to my new office.

As for time sync, I use Dimension4...works great...

I do do the odd extra thing (email, forum posts, ZProcess testing) on the pvr, and a reboot gives it a clean slate for the new day of recording.

I have had clean machines stay up for a long time too. It's just if I have it up for 100 days, and it screws up on the 101st day, Murphy will have made sure I need to record something that I can't get a copy off of torrent...

It's also directly after an EPG update, (yes the postEPG is a graet place to put my script) so the recording service is refreshed by the reboot.

As extra bumpersticker, I have been very successful with the adage, "When in doubt, reboot" (I even have my wife repeating that to her friends.)

If a computer does not reboot gracefully, and it's really a burden to restart, that's a symptom that should be looked at...

[tiger66]

Just wanted to share my solution for computer/GBPVR freeze up. I am using version 99.05 and my computer was freezing up at random times with no obvious log entries. A freeze up like this required that I reboot the computer each time and the recording service would stop and all functions on the computer would stop couldnt even VNC to it. So it finally did it while I was watching a show. So I was better able to track it down. Seems that the lockup was occuring because I had the system's clock set to automatically sync(Checkbox) with a time server specifically time.nist.gov here in the states.When it was unable to sync is when it would error out. I unchecked the box and have since had no problems. So this was my gremlin thought I would share hopefully it helps someone.

If you use time-a.nist.gov as your time server, it works much better. Since the Windows patch for fixing DST, time.nist.gov has not worked for me.

FYI,
tiger66

[divinehammer]

If you use time-a.nist.gov as your time server, it works much better. Since the Windows patch for fixing DST, time.nist.gov has not worked for me.

FYI,
tiger66

This is good to know seems though that I have had the lockup problem since January. I dont know why my method fixed it but it was dang hard to figure out I am not sure if I am out of the woods just yet either. after unchecking it ran for abou 8 days with no attention needed which is great. Then I turned on the screen saver in GBPVR it locked up that night at the begining of a recording. I unchecked the screen saver and I have been back up for 4 days so far I am just going to let it run for now and see how long it will go.
I wasnt trying to solve everyones problem just wanted to add info for the community to go off of it was hard to find some things about system lockups.