improve error handling

[mufunyo]

Because the archiver script crashes so often, I made a simple Bash script that retries the archiver infinitely until it returns 0. However, this morning I was greeted with "Error while loading camera list: 404" while the script exited "successfully". All errors should return something other than 0 to prevent this from happening.

[danielfernau]

Hey there, thanks for opening this issue.

The tool already returns non-zero exit codes for multiple different kinds of exceptions - let's see what I can do to improve exit- and error handling for this camera list 404 situation...

If you like you can post a bit more information about your crashes here (please remove/redact personal info from logs first) so that I can have a look and maybe add some improvements here and there to the tool for everyone's benefit...

[mufunyo]

The tool already returns non-zero exit codes for multiple different kinds of exceptions - let's see what I can do to improve exit- and error handling for this camera list 404 situation...

Maybe a simple solution is just to have the archiver return the HTTP status code? So in this case it would return 404 instead of 0.

If you like you can post a bit more information about your crashes here (please remove/redact personal info from logs first) so that I can have a look and maybe add some improvements here and there to the tool for everyone's benefit...

Here you go: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mufunyo/67b33fc52b224dd58b85b74c83ffa3b1/raw/f275c7b1385d20d6a8ae433ff7e4e9a98cee8382/archiver.log

If it's not too much to ask, suppressing the Python exception handler and just printing human-readable errors would already help immensely. Even a simple timeout pukes the entire terminal full of traceback and pushes any previous statuses outside of scrollback.

[danielfernau]

Alright, @mufunyo, thanks for the logs and your input. I can implement both ideas.

As to why stuff like this is sometimes not already included and also why it sometimes takes a considerable amount of days before I add or fix something: this is a personal weekend project of mine which I decided to open-source here for everyone to use, build upon, or make improvements to by means of a pull request or by opening an issue. I can only work on it if my schedule allows, and it's definitely not intended a 'perfect solution' by any means to a problem that IMHO shouldn't exist in the first place since UI advertises their appliances as 'business-grade network video recorder'...

But long story short, below is my task list - you'll be notified once the features are implemented as well as when the next version is available :)

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ToDo

• return HTTP Status Code as exit code on error
• improve error logging to console (hide tracebacks unless --verbose command line option is provided)

[mufunyo]

Oh I understand and agree completely. It's an absolute embarrassment that Ubiquiti don't expose a simple archiving function in their own UI, and I get that this is a part time project for you. That's why I didn't reach out before, if I can work around something myself I will, if it means I don't have to bother you with it. However I couldn't work around this particular issue (not without regex parsing stdout/stderr at least) so I figured I'd open an issue. I'm very grateful that you've built this and I'm looking forward to the improvements you have planned!