clabs

Just to update this...

I know I said that I didn't expect anything to come from filing a bug report, but today I received the following reply: 

"Dear Mark,

Thank you for your thorough bug report.

This will definitely help to have a closer look at this problem.

Your e-mail will be directly forwarded to the technical department.

Thank you once again.

Best regards,

your Xtrend team"

I have to say that I was quite surprised to receive anything back at all, least of all a fast and personalised one from a real human being. I know there is no guarantee that it'll be fixed but it does give a little faith that they are at least looking at it so well done and thank you, Extrend.  

WanWizard - thanks very much for the explanation - it has really helped my understanding of how things hang together.

Erik - I did post a bug report to ET yesterday. Whether I did this in the correct fashion is another matter! I didn't find anywhere on their website to specifically report bugs so I simply set out the issue and sent by email to master@et-view.com

Does that sound about right?

As this issue seems to be very isolated (in the 6 months I have been experimenting to try and find a solution, I didn't find a single other report of this happening to anyone else), the realist in me is telling me that nothing will come of it. But at least they are now aware.

Thanks very much for your help and advice guys )

Best regards, Mark

WanWizard

Thanks for setting me straight - and for the explanation about the kernel signature.

I really like that neat trick you showed me to upgrade the image whilst omitting certain modules. But unfortunately, there WAS a kernel update at the same time as the driver update so, as you predicted, that resulted in a non-booting box.

So, that kernel signature pretty much stumps me so far as changing anything driver-wise, right?

Just so I understand this better - is the kernel something that is produced by the box manufacturer, or is that built by the teams that build the images?

Once again, really appreciate your patience and help.

Cheers, Mark

Thanks WanWizard

When you say "kernel signature", do you mean the version number that is listed in the information/about page? If yes, then yes, it did change, from 3.14.21 to 3.14.21

In any case, I tried the commands you suggested and:

opkg list-installed | grep dvb-modules

Produced:

et-dvb-modules-et8500 - 3.14.21+20150417-r0.0

Then:

opkg flag hold et-dvb-modules-et8500 - 3.14.21+20150417-r0.0

Produced:

Package is not installed.

I am guessing that answers my kernel signature question?

Does that mean I should try and manually install the older drivers?

So sorry for all my newb questions - I hope I am learning but thank you for trying to help me.

Cheers, Mark

WanWizard

Thanks very much for taking the trouble to restore that August build for me. I just flashed that image and everything working fine again.

Erik

Thank you for your comprehensive explanation. That certainly clarifies (and simplifies) things for me and makes fault finding much simpler. So it is either network infrastructure, poor receiver performance or drivers. Other devices on my network are working perfectly and so is the ET8500 with older builds so I feel that proves that both of these are not the problem. But there was a driver update on 7/9/2015 which is very close to the time that my problems started and has not worked correctly with subsequent driver updates.

Would I be able to copy the older drivers into the newer image without any problems or is that too simplistic?   

Thanks for your input and help guys - really appreciate it.

Best regards, Mark