Startup: E0205 173852.452 main moonfire_nvr] Sys(EACCES)

[jlpoolen]

After implementing moonfire-nvr on a Raspberry Pi4 against an 8 TB Western Digital Purple with 4 Reolinks cameras feeding moonfire-nvr with 1920x1280 fps feed, I visited my web interface and found that I could only select the month of January, 2021. Today is 2/5/2021; all of February was grayed. I went into a shell and found my 8 TB allocation at 100% (with a little bit of wiggle room):

/dev/mapper/vgpurple-cameras 8521158564 8071073464 20571988 100% /mnt/purple

I tried killing moonfire-nvr, but I guess I started it as a system service. Unfortunately, my wiki is down because my Xen hypervisor crashed so I'm without all my notes of the install. Any rate, I ended up rebooted Pi and trying to start moonfire-nvr from where I built it. Here's my console session:

jlpoole@raspberrypi:/usr/local/src/moonfire-nvr $ target/release/moonfire-nvr run E0205 173852.452 main moonfire_nvr] Sys(EACCES) jlpoole@raspberrypi:/usr/local/src/moonfire-nvr $

I'm suspecting a storage threshold has been crossed and now I'm in the doldrums. I searched this site for instructions, I recall something kind of tricky in order to make room... maybe going into SQLite and deleting some entries?? Whatever. Any rate, I'm fish out of water (having my Xen - Dokuwiki instance unavilaible to me) and thus log this issue. I'm sure somebody, perhaps me again, in the future will find themselves in the same situation... a solidly running instance stops and resuming it requires something more than just "start".

I checked the "Troubleshooting" section and did not find anything applicable to the predicament I'm in.

What do I do, or where should I look?

[jlpoolen]

I did not have "sudo". So let the above document what happens when you forget to run moonfire-nvr not as root. Enhancement request: check if user is root and advise if not.

[scottlamb]

I agree that error message is terrible. I'll improve it. Also, one trick you can use when you get an uninformative error message is to set the RUST_BACKTRACE=1 environment variable.

I don't recommend running as root. It just needs permissions on the db and sample file dirs (and on the files it already created within them if you're fixing an existing install). I run it as a dedicated moonfire-nvr user, and the install instructions should help you get that set up.

[scottlamb]

Oh, that's right: I did improve it, in d83bb1b. If you run a more current version, you should see something like this instead:

[slamb@nuc ~]$ sudo -u nobody moonfire-nvr run
E0205 191848.813 main moonfire_nvr] Sys(EACCES)

unable to open db dir /var/lib/moonfire-nvr/db: EACCES: Permission denied

Is that more helpful?

[jlpoolen]

Yes, "Permission denied" would clue me in. The benefit here is that I return to this with virtually an empty mind, so a fresh look is helpful. After I get my Xen server going, I'll come back and sync up and rebuild.

It is nice to be able to start this and then just walk away from it for months simply enjoying the ability to download video snippets when needed.

[scottlamb]

After I get my Xen server going, I'll come back and sync up and rebuild.

You could also try the new pre-built Docker container.

[jlpoolen]

I wasn't sure if Docker would work on a Raspberry Pi. But if it will, I am game.

(btw.... I've lost about 2 weeks because I thought I'd be clever and use LVM for my entire disk and Xen environment, that was a terrible mistake. https://serverfault.com/questions/279571/lvm-dangers-and-caveats. I started having my nano session suddenly wiped clean -- coming from a Debian lvm 2.0.3 to Gentoo 1.78.x; I read the afore-referenced article and wow. Back to basics with fdisk and good old partitions.)

[scottlamb]

Docker works on my Raspberry Pi 4.