Troubleshooting

Here are some tips for diagnosing various problems with Moonfire NVR. Feel free to open an issue if you need more help.

Viewing Moonfire NVR's logs

While Moonfire NVR is running, logs will be written to stderr.

When running the configuration UI, you typically should redirect stderr to a text file to avoid poor interaction between the interactive stdout output and the logging. If you use the recommended nvr config 2>debug-log command, output will be in the debug-log file.
When running detached through Docker, Docker saves the logs for you. Try nvr logs or docker logs moonfire-nvr.
When running through systemd, stderr will be redirected to the journal. Try sudo journalctl --unit moonfire-nvr to view the logs. You also likely want to set MOONFIRE_FORMAT=google-systemd to format logs as expected by systemd.

Logging options are controlled by environment variables:

MOONFIRE_LOG controls the log level. Its format is similar to the RUST_LOG variable used by the env-logger crate. MOONFIRE_LOG=info is the default. MOONFIRE_LOG=info,moonfire_nvr=debug gives more detailed logging of the moonfire_nvr crate itself.
MOONFIRE_FORMAT selects the output format. The two options currently accepted are google (the default, like the Google glog package) and google-systemd (a variation for better systemd compatibility).
Errors include a backtrace if RUST_BACKTRACE=1 is set.

If you use Docker, set these via Docker's --env argument.

Problems

`Error: pts not monotonically increasing; got 26615520 then 26539470`

If your streams cut out and you see error messages like this one in Moonfire NVR logs, it might mean that your camera outputs B frames. If you believe this is the case, file a feature request; Moonfire NVR currently doesn't support B frames. You may be able to configure your camera to disable B frames in the meantime.

`moonfire-nvr config` displays garbage

This happens if your machine is configured to a non-UTF-8 locale, due to gyscos/Cursive#13. As a workaround, try setting the environment variable LC_ALL=C.UTF-8. This should automatically be set with the Docker container.

Moonfire NVR reports problems with the database or filesystem

It's helpful to check out your system's overall health when diagnosing problems with Moonfire NVR.

Look at your kernel logs. On most Linux systems, you can browse them via journalctl, dmesg, or less /var/log/messages. See Errors in kernel logs below for some common problems.
Use smartctl to look at SMART ("Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART)") attributes on your flash and hard drives. Backblaze reports that the following SMART attributes are most predictive of drive failure:
- SMART 5: Reallocated Sectors Count
- SMART 187: Reported Uncorrectable Errors
- SMART 188: Command Timeout
- SMART 197: Current Pending Sector Count
- SMART 198: Uncorrectable Sector Count If the RAW value for any of these attributes is non-zero, it's likely your problem is due to hardware.
Use smartctl to run a self-test on your flash and hard drives.
Run fsck on your filesystems.

Your root filesystem is best checked on startup, before it's mounted as read-write. On most Linux systems, you can force fsck to run on next startup via the fsck.mode=force kernel parameter, as documented here.

If you have hard drives dedicated to Moonfire NVR, you can also shut down Moonfire NVR, unmount the filesystem, and run fsck on them without rebooting.

After the system as a whole is verified healthy, run moonfire-nvr check while Moonfire NVR is stopped to verify integrity of the SQLite database and sample file directories.

Errors in kernel logs

UAS errors

Some cheap USB SATA adapters don't appear to work reliably in UAS mode under Linux. If you see errors like the following, try disabling UAS. Unfortunately your filesystem is likely to have corruption, so after disabling UAS, run a fsck and then moonfire-nvr check to try recovering.

Sep 22 17:26:01 nuc kernel: sd 4:0:0:1: [sdb] tag#2 uas_eh_abort_handler 0 uas-tag 3 inflight: CMD OUT
Sep 22 17:26:01 nuc kernel: sd 4:0:0:1: [sdb] tag#2 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 4d b4 c4 00 00 00 03 b0 00 00

Filesystem errors

Errors that mention EXT4-fs (or your filesystem of choice) likely indicate filesystem corruption. Run fsck to fix as described above. Once the corruption is addressed, use moonfire-nvr check to survey the damage to your database.

Jan 28 07:26:27 nuc kernel: EXT4-fs (sdc1): error count since last fsck: 12
Jan 28 07:26:27 nuc kernel: EXT4-fs (sdc1): initial error at time 1576998292: ext4_validate_block_bitmap:376
Jan 28 07:26:27 nuc kernel: EXT4-fs (sdc1): last error at time 1579640202: ext4_validate_block_bitmap:376
...
Feb 13 04:48:43 nuc kernel: EXT4-fs error (device sdc1): ext4_validate_block_bitmap:376: comm kworker/u8:2: bg 57266: bad block bitmap checksum
Feb 13 04:48:43 nuc kernel: EXT4-fs (sdc1): Delayed block allocation failed for inode 7334278 at logical offset 0 with max blocks 11 with error 74
Feb 13 04:48:43 nuc kernel: EXT4-fs (sdc1): This should not happen!! Data will be lost

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