7.10 Schema upgrade woes

[Panhead Bill]

Front end/Master Back End 7.10RC no updates.
Front end/Secondary Back End 7.10RC.

Master FE/BE has been working for many months, so I have not updated it. (did that with 6.10 and it hosed everything)

I am trying to get the secondary FE/BE running, and after loading 7.10 I tried it out and things started to work. I then did the updates and hit the dreaded Schema upgrade endless loop.

Is this due to the older setup on the Master Back End or just a problem with the schema upgrade in general?

Have most folks been able to update 7.10 successfuly?
Have most folks been able to upgrade to 8.04 successfully?

I am reluctant to upgrade (due to prior problems) unless I have a couple of days available in case I have to start from scratch (again).

In a setup with multiple front end/back ends, do all the systems need to be at the same version to work well or at all?

[klc5555]

It's mythtv that has to be the same version across an array of backends/frontends, to avoid the dreaded protocol mismatch error. The OS is not particularly an issue.

As to your upgrade woes, my own personal advice (worth next to nothing, I know!) would be to say it depends on what your primary interest is in that backend machine. If you're approaching it as a hobbyist, then by all means take the time necessary to upgrade, and have fun solving the problems that may (and likely will) afflict the machine for a while. But if your primary interest is simply watching and recording tv, and the backend machine has been stable and problem-free for many months, then why not leave it alone and make your new frontend match it?

You could do this perhaps by installing the same version of mythbuntu on the new frontend, then either keeping it at this level or allowing upgrades to everything except for the version-level mythtv packages themselves, in order to arrive at the "final" 7.10, while retaing your version of mythtv. I suppose you could install, say, plain-vanilla non-myth Ubuntu 8.04.1 on the new frontend, and then force it to install the earlier version of mythtv from the Gutsy repositories. You could even, I suppose, download and compile the necessary version of the mythtv tarball itself and install it in any reasonably current Linux distro, not just Ubuntu 8.04. In any of these cases, you're left with only one set of problems --getting your new frontend machine working and talking with your good old reliable backend. If you upgrade everything to current levels, you have at least two sets of problems, of which problems, some in the frontend machine are bound to be unrelated to the the problems arising in the backend machine.

It all depends on what your primary interest is. Just have fun and upgrade! (or not!) :)

All the best!

[Panhead Bill]

Does anyone have an idea which package(s) require the database schema to change from 1177 to 1214?

Are there plans for some sort of "local myth network" update control that would keep all of the machines' packages in a myth system syncronized when updates are performed?

It looks like I may end up performing the upgrade to 8.04 on the master and the first slave machine, and later this year do it again to 8.10 when I get the second slave machine running.

The slave machines should not be too bad, since they are single drive/single capture card setups. Basic functions are usually 1 or 2 days of effort.

The master however is a 5 drive LVE/2 card unit, and if things go south during the upgrade it will take my system offline and from past experiance several days will be needed to get up and running.

How have others handled a multi-machine setup?