Tvheadend

Hi,

Just wanted to share a discovery to an issue which has been vexing me lately. My tvheadend server is also acting as a firewall for my Internet connection.

Whilst watching or recording tv using tvheadend I would get random Continuity counter errors in the log and related break ups of picture and sounds on recordings. I noticed these occurred at the same time as a packet drop was logged to syslog on the firewall. A few examples:

Apr 12 09:45:38 tvserver kernel: [2463451.991395] Invalid packet: IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:0d:88:32:fb:14:00:27:0d:c9:04:e1:08:00 SRC=88.98.37.186 DST=10.102.1.5 LEN=40 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=50 ID=0 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=46669 DPT=9981 WINDOW=0 RES=0x00 RST URGP=0
Apr 12 09:45:38 tvserver tvheadend[1757]: TS: DiBcom 7000PC/North West: 706,000 kHz/BBC ONE: MPEG2VIDEO @ #101: Continuity counter error, 3 duplicate log lines suppressed
Apr 12 09:45:38 tvserver tvheadend[1757]: TS: DiBcom 7000PC/North West: 706,000 kHz/BBC ONE: MPEG2AUDIO @ #102: Continuity counter error, 2 duplicate log lines suppressed
Apr 12 09:47:16 tvserver kernel: [2463550.231210] INPUT packet died: IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:0d:88:32:fb:14:00:27:0d:c9:04:e1:08:00 SRC=114.69.10.169 DST=10.102.1.5 LEN=40 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=98 ID=256 PROTO=TCP SPT=6000 DPT=135 WINDOW=16384 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
Apr 12 09:47:16 tvserver tvheadend[1757]: TS: DiBcom 7000PC/North West: 706,000 kHz/BBC ONE: MPEG2AUDIO @ #102: Continuity counter error, 1 duplicate log lines suppressed

Initially I thought that disk activity (to write the log) might have caused this... but writing large file to the var partition caused no issues. Also logged events like cron tasks log OK with no ill effects.

I reconfigured the firewall not to log any events to the syslog, and this has much improved the situation.

I don't really have any explanation for this behaviour, but thought it may be useful to share.

All the best

C