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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2009 11:38 am 
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Joined: Fri Feb 08, 2008 9:19 pm
Posts: 70
I'm tired of the size/sound of my combined FE/BE machine.

So I'm planning on splitting the system and changing to a
small, diskless, QUIET frontend. Initially I was going to set
up a dedicated BE machine, but it seems wasteful to have both a
normal "desktop" machine and a MythTV backend machine running
all the time.

Has anybody had any experience running the backend on a
non-dedicated machine -- one that's also used for "normal"
stuff (SW development, web browsing, e-mail, etc.)?

My tuner is network-attached (HDHR), so all the backend is
doing is shoveling bytes back and forth from between the
network and the disk drive -- that doesn't require much CPU at
all, and I'll probably keep the recordings on a dedicated
drive.

Sadly, that means the backend won't be running KM any more...

--
Grant

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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2009 1:52 pm 
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I've read about folks doing it, but I can't point you to a specific post or website. I wonder if you can make use of a virtual machine running KM/LinHES? In principal, I see no reason why that wouldn't work. What host O/S are you wanting to use, Linux or Winblows?

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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2009 3:38 pm 
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graysky wrote:
I've read about folks doing it, but I can't point you to a
specific post or website. I wonder if you can make use of a
virtual machine running KM/LinHES? In principal, I see no
reason why that wouldn't work.

I expect that could be made to work, but it sounds like extra
work and overhead.
Quote:
What host O/S are you wanting to use, Linux or
Winblows?

Gentoo Linux.

There's a Gentoo package for MythTV, and I have heard from one
gentoo user who runs his MythTV backend on his general-purpose
desktop. He had problems with recordings until he put the
MythTV data on a dedicated disk. He was using a PVR-250 which
has fairly modest disk i/o requirements, so I imagine it would
have been even worse recording an ATSC HD program stream.

I was planning on a dedicated MythTV drive anyway, so I'm
going to give it a try in a couple weeks.

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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2009 4:27 pm 
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The VM is probably easy compared to setting up mythtv, mysql, apache, etc. on a Linux box from scratch, no?

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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2009 9:11 pm 
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Joined: Mon Dec 24, 2007 9:47 am
Posts: 535
Location: Ottawa, Canada
graysky wrote:
The VM is probably easy compared to setting up mythtv, mysql, apache, etc. on a Linux box from scratch, no?


I have to agree with Graysky. The point of KM or LinHES is that is a simple install yet feature rich environment. In the backend alone setting up mythweb will be easier just using stock KM vs figuring out all the magical incantations in your favourite distro.

I run my master backend in a VMWare guest which simplified my life. I describe this in a few places but perhaps to the point in: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.p ... c&start=26

Before I went to VM I was installing mythtv from atrpms on to my main server which is CentOS based. It was simply more work and upgrades were trickier and riskier.

C


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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2009 9:50 pm 
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graysky wrote:
The VM is probably easy compared to setting up mythtv, mysql,
apache, etc. on a Linux box from scratch, no?

Possibly, though setting up mythtv "from scratch" didn't seem
that hard the last time I did it (which, I admit, was a few
years ago). That was a combined FE/BE box using a PVR-350 which
required several additional drivers, and mythtv had to be built
from sources because binary packages for the CPU I was using
weren't available. It took most of a Sunday, but it wasn't
particularly difficult -- except for the part where you use the
mythv GUI for configuring stuff (and you can get around much of
that by using SQL commands to change the settings instead of
have to guess which off-screen buttons are highlighted).

This time, MySQL and Apache are already set up, and mythv isn't
going to require any device drivers or kernel modules: no video
card drivers, no capture card drivers, no lirc drivers/configs,
no Xv/XvMC, etc. It should be pretty straight-forward. (Famous
last words...)

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