Nightly reboots: Why they must go...

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John Kotches

John Kotches

SatelliteGuys Master
Original poster
Supporting Founder
Nov 21, 2003
6,765
197
Troy, IL (STL Area)
I have been a vocal critic of Dish and the enforcement of a nightly reboot of the Hopper. I assume this occurs with Hopper with Sling as well but I have been known to be wrong.

On a couple of occasions I've noticed that it was down for a while, as much as an hour for the nightly reboot and last night I decided to gather proof.

This is my first check of the Hopper when it wasn't available:
20130414_015720.jpg

It was at 1:57am and at this point, the hopper had been down for 30+ minutes. That is 1/48th of the day, or > 2% of the day. I continued monitoring and snapping pictures at 2 minute intervals and the last shot I got before it finally finished was this one:

20130414_022735.jpg

The last photo was taken at 2:27am, and it was in minute 61 (after this shot) when the hopper finally became available again. At this point, I've now had my hopper unavailable for > 4% of the day.

I'll follow on with my rant in a different post.
 
Some think I have been extremely (and overly) critical of the Hopper for the nightly reboots. I would argue that I set higher standards. I'm paying for a service and the devices aren't available a significant portion of the time. If my systems only had uptimes of 95.x% they wouldn't be my systems any longer; I'd be unemployed. Even standalone systems should be able to maintain 99% uptime. Clearly that isn't the case with hopper.

During the hopper reboot, no recordings can kick off and any attached joeys are unavailable. Yes, it's done in the middle of the night but I've missed recordings because the nightly reboot doesn't complete quickly enough. If you have 2 hoppers, your still SOL, as they both reboot at about the same time.

I have managed various flavors of Unix systems for 25 years. In those 25 years I haven't had any systems that required daily or even weekly reboots. I have encountered poorly written applications which required restarts on a scheduled basis due to memory leaks. But that didn't require a reboot of the OS to clean up, after all it's Unix of some form. I currently manage ~150 nodes with ~250 unique OS instances and in the vicinity of 350 TB of user data in a directly customer facing application.

Hopper is in a directly customer facing application.

Vivek:

If you have any background in IT and specifically in service delivery you should be appalled by this. At this point I want an explanation -- why must these be rebooted nightly and why does a system check that you obviously think should take 10 minutes (or you wouldn't put it up there) taking 60+ minutes. Since the hopper is a purpose built computer running some flavor of a *nix OS on a MIPS processor I expect it to behave like one.

Your product is in a directly customer facing role, and you need to treat it as though it is. Currently from my perspective you are not.
 
Disconnect your ehd for 1 night and see what happens. See how lnag the rebot takes. I know my Hopper with a 2 tb ehd takes longer to reboot than the one with a 750 mb hd.
 
To expand on my previous answer:

The filesystems are ext3fs. Assuming the system is being rebooted properly (something along the lines of shutdown -r now) the filesystems will be properly unmounted and marked clean. The fsck time for a clean filesystem even in multiple TB sizes is measured in seconds. If they aren't shutting down properly or they have the fsck interval set to 1 day or 1 mount it will check every time. I haven't delved into that. I spend enough time on this type of stuff at work.
 
John, we know this is your area of expertise and you put food on your table with your knowledge. However, a bunch of us have noted that when you have long boot times on the Hopper and have an EHD, unplugging that EHD will seriously reduce that boot time. Why this is, I don't know, but, this is..... :)
 
Bobby:

That's a workaround, and frankly I don't have the desire to take those measures for a defect. There are others in my house and I'd rather not force them to go unplug stuff.



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 using Tapatalk 2.x
 
I hear ya John.... But, the amount of viewers at boot time is small, myself included. While it would be cool to make everyone happy, that simply isn't possible. I am never affected by slow boot times, EHD included, and most subs aren't because we are on a different schedule than you are, and apparently your household as well....
 
Bobby said:
I hear ya John.... But, the amount of viewers at boot time is small, myself included. While it would be cool to make everyone happy, that simply isn't possible. I am never affected by slow boot times, EHD included, and most subs aren't because we are on a different schedule than you are, and apparently your household as well....
Click to expand...

Microsoft has you well brainwashed to think that any of this is acceptable.

Start thinking of this as a file server with multiple clients, because that is its role among others.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 using Tapatalk 2.x
 
Well you've been told the workaround, ranting at people for trying to help wont get you anywhere. Maybe Dish will read this thread, maybe not. I highly doubt that anything will be done about this anytime soon. You are far from the first person to complain about this flaw. Hopper has been out for a year now and they haven't bothered to fix this. Like it or lump it. They'll fix it if/when they want to.

Sent from my iPhone 4S using Forum Runner
 
3HaloODST said:
Well you've been told the workaround, ranting at people for trying to help wont get you anywhere. Maybe Dish will read this thread, maybe not. I highly doubt that anything will be done about this anytime soon. You are far from the first person to complain about this flaw. Hopper has been out for a year now and they haven't bothered to fix this. Like it or lump it. They'll fix it if/when they want to.
Click to expand...

Why do I hear the sounds of Bruce Hornsby's That's Just the Way It Is playing in my head. I'm not happy with the status quo, and I'm being vocal about it.
 
Because that always fixes it, complaining on the Internet. Call DISH directly. See if a replacement will help fix it. My hopper is never down for an hour even in the rare nights it does have a software update and the ehd is connected.

Sent From My Samsung Hercules
 
Hey, no problem with you being vocal about this issue. It certainly needs to be fixed, but the smart-arse responses when people make suggestions are not called for.

As for why it takes so long on the EHDs, the USB 2.0 interface presents a bottleneck which drastically increases the time for the fsck to complete.

Sent from my iPad 2 using Forum Runner
 
This just is all is crazy to me. I'm up at least three nights a week when my Hopper updates. I've got a 500 GB EHD connected. I am NEVER, EVER down for more than 15 minutes. John, I think you might have a problem with your Hopper. How about directing your energy toward that possibility?
 
KAB said:
This just is all is crazy to me. I'm up at least three nights a week when my Hopper updates. I've got a 500 GB EHD connected. I am NEVER, EVER down for more than 15 minutes. John, I think you might have a problem with your Hopper. How about directing your energy toward that possibility?
Click to expand...

How full is your EHD? The fuller (and larger) the EHD, the longer it takes.

Sent from my iPad 2 using Forum Runner
 
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