First off, NZBDrone leaves dust to other alternatives. It’s also really great to see it’s actively developed and searched for. I hope to make my first contribution soon. (And the forums! Markdown and BBEdit, automatic suggestions…great!)
Now, I seem to be not understanding something here. It’s covered in the FAQ, but I still don’t understand, so bear with me. I just want to make sure I understand what this issue and the logic behind it.
So let’s say I’ve added something to NZBDrone and this something is released on a daily basis. NZBDrone knows it’s missing, but it won’t download it. Why is that? From reading the FAQ, I think I understand that that’s the way it’s supposed to work? So basically if my machine was off at the time the episode aired (or rather, at the time nzbs for this episode were released), I will have to manually download it later?
Drone will watch the RSS feeds from the indexers you add, if its online when its posted it will see it and grab it. If its offline it will run and RSS sync and then look for anything its still missing that aired since the last sync time plus an additional 3 days before (just in case something was posted late). If its not available than drone will still watch RSS feeds for it. If the episode aired days/weeks/months ago and it was only recently added to drone it won’t search for those missing episodes (you can manually if you wish), but it will watch the RSS feeds.
The same is true for wanted upgrades, drone won’t search for them, but will watch for them to appear on the RSS feeds.
So just so I understand this: NZBDrone does not continously search for stuff that I marked as monitored, it simply scans everything in the RSS sent by indexers. This means that if enough stuff was sent out by those indexers to push this montiored stuff from the recent “100 items”, OR that this stuff was pulled while my machine was off — NZBDrone would treat as non-existent, or at least not try and look for it specifically in those feeds.
Is that correct? And if it is, what is the rationale behind this? I’m not being critical of this decision, just want to understand what lies behind it.
Not exactly, if your machine was off drone would search when it came back online, by actually searching, though that wasn’t extremely clear:
if something aired months ago, was missing from your library and was missed, then it would be missed.
The main rationale is this quote:
Taking it a step further: drone doesn’t do automatic searches because it offers no benefit after searching the first time, except when drone is offline, but we have extra steps to grab recently aired episodes (as mentioned above).
But that thing aired hours ago, not months or days even. More accurately, it aired at 06:00 my time, I pulled computer back from sleep at around 12:00. NZBDrone and SAB were running at the time.
I have had this same problem VERY rarely. 99.9% of the time Drone automagically grabs everything, for whatever reason it occasionally doesn’t download something even when several NZB’s show up in a manual search that fit my criteria. I had that happen just today on an episode that had been posted 33 hours earlier. One click of the automatic search and it grabbed it with no problem.
Does clicking the automatic search button next to the missed episode trigger the download?
We were speaking in hypotheticals, but since you have a concrete issue, check the logs, you should see a search kicked off for those episodes following the RSS sync.
These errors happened every time NZBDrone tried to sync RSS since my laptop came back to sleep at 12:34pm. [[Not true — see EDIT below]]
Also, the first error at 12:33, was this:
Failed to Update Scene Mappings:: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
EDIT: Actually, so what I said above isn’t not entirely true — from the times these errors are showing, that’s probably when the computer was not yet connected to the internet, that’s when they happened. NZBDrone did complete several RSS syncs successfully since then without errors, but still found nothing for that piece of content that aired this morning my time.
Clarity note: Before starting this thread I performed a manual search for it and it’s downloading. I’ll see if it fails to grab it tomorrow as well. Just wanted to know whether I’m experiencing a bug or not — which I seem to be.
we fixed that error yesterday in develop/master, but the underlying issue of not having connectivity may have caused it (but we’ll log that now instead of hiding it).
The lack of connection would have caused the job to execute, run into errors, but the entire job passed because those errors are contained, so the search never would have fired, subsequent RSS syncs would not have kicked off the search because the job ran recently.
We’ll be looking at the job running before internet connectivity issue via this card:
As for experiencing a bug, not exactly, its just not working as intended due to a connectivity issue, outside of drone’s control. Dealing with the underlying issue will be a feature we’ll have to implement.
As for experiencing a bug, not exactly, its just not working as intended due to a connectivity issue, outside of drone’s control. Dealing with the underlying issue will be a feature we’ll have to implement.
As I said, other jobs after the first one were completed successfully — so NZBDrone should have found that release and sent to to SABnzbd.
If it was still on the RSS feed, otherwise no. The only way to confirm it was is with debug logs on. Make sure you turn those on as well so we can see what drone saw at the time, otherwise its a guessing game.
Update, day 2: Automatic grab worked flawlessly today. This means:
I jumped the gun regarding this, because:
It seems that NZBDrone always fails on its first attempt to do an RSS sync, because a laptop coming back from sleep (in my case — rMBP) takes time to reconnect to a WiFi network. So the first attempt fails, and reports that no new episodes were found. This means that the first “true” auto-grab will happen 15 minutes after starting up from sleep mode.
So there was no “bug” really, nor anything I shouldn’t have expected. I was just a little impatient and unsure. Adding a little delay (2-3min) to NZBDrone on laptops would probably solve this, but it’s not a huge deal for me.