I have a couple of SFF boxes that I would like to setup as Frontend Only Installs for use with my Knoppmyth system.

Box #1 is a Celeron 533Mhz w/ 256Mb ram
Box #2 is a Celeron 733Mhz w/256Mb ram

In my testing setups, I am using a 6.4Gb hard drive for the install and both machines have their own assigned IPs.

I've followed all the instructions for NFS mounts from the backend, etc.

One of the things I've noticed is that after viewing a recorded program for a while, I will start to get short pauses during playback.

My question is specificly regarding howif/ the frontend uses disk space to buffer the incoming recording. Since the default install uses the bulk of the HD space for /root and /swap, with the small remainder going to /myth, is the 6.4Gb size of the hard drive affecting playback?

Is so, should I manually set up the hard drive with different sizes, and, if so, what would be the suggested settings?

KnoppMyth is a great piece of work, and I am really impressed with the quality and usefullness of the R5E50 release, as I have tried previous versions in the past, and this release was the only one I was ever able to actually get installed and up and running the way I wanted it to.

DaveJ45

The disk should be fine. This more likely has to do with the amount of RAM and the network access. You may want to increase the buffering under TV setup, and make sure that you have XvMC working if your video card supports it. See Known Issue #10 here http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13108.

Does any know if I used a 4gb or 8gb compact flash, then used a compact flash -> IDE adapter, would I be able to install/run knoppmyth onto this without going through the crazy frontend NFSRoot setup? The PXE boot + NSFroot seems time consuming. I found an way to use a USB thumb drive for the kernal, but it still requires NFSRoot.

WOuld i need 8gb or is 4gb enough?

I'm hoping the compact flash + IDE Adapter would allow me to simply go through the FrontEnd auto setup routine and and everything would be good.

I plan to go HDTV with an AMD 4400+ using an Abit NF-M2 motherboard with 2gb of RAM. I'm hoping that the extra RAM would allow me to get away from needing swap space. The HDTV tuner would be on the backend.

Thanks.

It's really not that difficult with Greg Frost's script; http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10098

Compact flash/SD aren't meant for the number of writes/rewrites that a hard disk handles. You can get around that, but if you thought network boot/NFSroot was time consuming... http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14647

Nice rig. Why avoid using a small hard drive?

Thanks. I'm trying to get as quiet as possible.

This is for the front end only, so, there would be no databases. The only items that would be updated would be log files in /var/log.. right?

I'll find a cheap laptop 2.5 drive - pretty much any of those would be fairly quiet. Of course, i'll visit some silent pc type sites for ideas.

Now, to tackle the CPU cooling.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/ also has some excellent recommendations for coolers, although they tend toward the huge towers. I'm using a Zalman 7000 AlCu set on low speed and it's plenty quiet and keeps the CPU at a reasonable temperature even when the weather indoors is approaching 100F/38C.