I have not deleted any questions... And am locking up...
Running hijack 271.

Okay, I just upgraded to v271 and tested out emptriv. Practically got tendonitis zipping through about 100-200 questions before I decided that I'm definitely not seeing this one. What else is new?

I don't really know where to go to debug this one. However, I plan to (sometime after my class project is done early next week) port emptriv to the new vfdlib graphics library. That'll give me a chance to look into other stuff too. In the meantime, anyone who's handy with a shell prompt can help me by answering these questions:

1. Can you still get around in the shell when emptriv hangs?
2. If #1 is yes: After this lockup happens, is the emptriv process still running?
3. If you have "wc" (word count) installed on your empeg (usually in /usr/bin) can you run a

"ls -1 | wc -l /usr/local/emptriv/questions"

for me, to count the # of files in the questions directory? (substitute the path of your questions directory)

Otherwise I don't really know how to get to the bottom of this one, short of sending out a massively-instrumented version and pouring through log files. I do enough of that at work.

I'll try to diagnose it as i get it also. However, I just got an incredible (programming / computer) job today. Which is awesome in some many ways but means I have less time for my empeg, we'll have to see how much time I can juggle to it.

John

I have a silly question...

I've been reading this thread and I wonder...

Would those "lock up" symptoms happen if they were missing some of the Emptriv files? For example, if they had tried to install Emptriv to the root partition instead of drive0/var and ran out of disk space and therefore didn't have all the files in place?

Just a wild guess.

Congrats on the job! Yeah I have the same dilemma. I write code by day, and it's hard to come home and work on emptriv. I enjoy it, but sometimes, I just wanna sit out on the porch and read Maxim.

Well I went through that, saying that people shouldn't go deleting files. Interestingly enough though, if it ran out of space while creating the files, it *should* work because the files should still be numbered consecutively, and not be missing any in the middle. I would most expect this to happen if files were missing in the middle, like if a category had 0000, 0001, and then 0099 or something. Because my poor-man's random algorithm counts the # in each category in the beginning, stores that, and picks one of those. If it doesn't exist, I'm not sure what happens, but I can try it out when I get home.

lectric has been PMing me and he claims that emptriv is disappearing from the ps output, suggests it's crashing, maybe running out of memory or something. It shouldn't be a memory hog, but the GD lib (and my inefficient use of it) can't be helping... Maybe a port to vfdlib will do the trick.

hey tony, another quick question, any idea on my weird stuff on the questions and answers it will go like this. there will be a questions thats all fine and dandy

Q: what is the blah blah blah...blah

then the answers screen will come up and ill always get a random number from 1 - 10 in the 1st answer spot

a: [1] 8 [2] a regular answer [3] a regular answer ..ect.

then lets say i answer wrong or if the right answer isnt there becuase its in slot 1 with the random number it will show up like this

Wrong Answer, The Correct Answer is [@]

any ideas?

OMG!
i tihnk i figure out whats wrong, all of the game files are in dos format, looks like i have to start over with the install.

Looks like a bug... Actually, did you unzip the archive on Windows and then transfer it to your Empeg somehow? That looks like something that could happen if the linefeeds got screwed up. Windows and UNIX use different characters for linefeeds, and I'm not sure how I'll handle if they get screwed up.

You say this happens on all your questions? If it just happens on a few, then there's a possibility the a few of the question files are messed up. I obviously didn't write 20,000 trivia questions myself, it was a bit of Perl magic and I did my best to make sure they were all in good syntax, but who knows... Could you elaborate on the problem a bit?

Haha, jinx.

Maybe it's time for an emptriv FAQ.

I untar'd right on my empeg. For all you interested, I changed ReserveCache to 212, giving roughly 1 Meg of free RAM, so that shouldn't be a problem. Alll the files are there, and installed from linux, the directory is /drive0/after/emptriv. It is launching through preinit.d using:

cd /drive0/after/emptriv
./emptriv

when the process locks, memory is instantly released to the available memory and the process is gone, however, the display is completely locked. Music keeps playing, I can telnet in and poke around, etc.

anything else anyone wants to know about my scenario?

Oh, running 2.0b11 Dev /w hijack 271 on an MKIIa.

RAM doesn't seem to be a problem, and since it always locks up in the same spot, and I'm not allocating any memory there, I'm officially ruling out RAM. No idea what it could be though, since I don't have a reproducable test case.

BTW, don't run with a high ReserveCache like that during normal operation, or your player app won't be caching and will always have to read from disk a lot.

And if it IS fouled up question files, and only a few are fouled up, that's gonna be a bitch to find as it would be the NEXT question, not the current question. And by the way, If you don't feel like working on this, then don't for a while. There is no terrible rush here. I know this type of stuff is a royal PITA, it one of the reasons I quit coding like seven years ago. I wouldn't even know where to begin anymore, things have changed so much.

putting it back now

yikes, im having the same emplode problem now as well, emplode dosnt like emptriv running while it sync, if i close emptriv it syncs fine, i even put another RO command into my preinit and that still didt do it, i get this error when emptriv is running "Synchronize failed while checking media. Error 0xc0041010" i made hijack and empeg-preinit 755 in both /bin/ and /sbin/ ive messed with it minimal, but still nothing only way i can sync is to close emptriv, or take it out of the preinit and reboot.. *shugs* any ideas tony,

also thanks for being a champ thru all these emptriv questions it seem the program has gotten quite popular in the last few weeks, strange since its been out for so long.

Doc, it hurts when I do this...

"Don't do that."

One thing I know is that checking the media (fsck) takes up a good deal of memory, in fact the player app turns swap on before it does the fsck to avoid such a crash.

I have no idea why it would cause a crash. I also don't really want to test it out because I value my music partition and crashes while fsck is running are bad for your music's health.

So, like, quit out of Emptriv (and all other user apps, I would recommend) before you sync.

I also note this crash as a low-medium priority. I also use the preinit (not franks' init) if that matters. My files have never been on a windows machine, either. To me this this bug smells like one that like be hard to try make happen on an empeg that it wasn't happening on. we (the people expiriencing the crash) should be responsible for providing more info, or better yet, diagnosing it ourselves.

John

Sounds good. Whatever info I get, I will take note of and try to address when I go to port emptriv to the new graphics lib. That will at least be a bit of a change, and chances are I'll clean up some other code while I'm in there. I am done with my classes next Tuesday, so after that, when the sun goes down, my time is pretty much mine. Looking forward to having some empeg-hacking time.

sweeet.. if u need any help with anything ill do my best.. im mostly a gfx guys, maybe a nice webpage for ur software

I would appreciate help on this - how would I add emptriv to the modified init and how would I set the modified init to run on startup? Thanks in advance.

Hrmmm... Mine does the sync error too. And I completely forgot about this till just now. -=DOH=- Workin fine now.

Chango, Do a search on preinit.d. Pretty easy, actually. I was surprised.

i've figured out why emplode gets that sync error. for some reason, sync tries to umount the drive, and cant do that because the process emptriv is still running. it halts after that. do we need to modify some script so you kill emptriv before you do umount?

Hrmmm... I also have to kill VNC. (Killed telnetd too for good measure). In other words, -=SHRUG=-

any process thats running from the music drives would have to be killed before u can sync. thats the way it is, i guess.

I just installed your emptriv program, nice work. Great app. The only thing that is bothering me, is the having to kill the process before running emplode. Is there anyway, we could move the binary emptriv file to anywhere but the music partition, say /usr/userland for example, but keeping all the questions and other files on the music drive. I guess you would just need to recompile the binary, and have them look for the files in the correct location. Would tihs solve the problem that emptriv is having with emplode?

see this link