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 Post subject: Microdrive
PostPosted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:16 am 
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Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:39 pm
Posts: 19
Location: State College, PA
Has anyone built a knoppmyth setup using a 2 GB microdrive as the only drive on the device. I plan on mounting a network drive for all the media content and storage. Will the microdrive work well? I'm looking at it for low power and low heat specs because I want to run my setup without a fan.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:33 am 
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Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 2:08 pm
Posts: 13
Location: Los Angeles
I'd think 2G would fill up rather quickly. Is there a typo I missed ?

It's likely quite slow, and not too usefull. How much space does a half
hour show take up ??


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 Post subject: Re: Microdrive
PostPosted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 12:01 pm 
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Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 12:04 pm
Posts: 369
Well, since an hour of video takes up at least 1.1GB, and the standard knoppmyth install sets aside...18GB(?) for live tv/recording cache space, I do not think it will work well.

-brendan


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 Post subject: Update
PostPosted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 12:06 pm 
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Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:39 pm
Posts: 19
Location: State College, PA
Ok... I obviously was not very clear in what I asked. Allow me to restate.

I want to put a 2 or 4 GB Microdrive on my mythtv box. This drive will hold the operating system only.

Now, I have another server with 800 GB of space. I want to mount that drive over NFS to the set-top box and use that to store all the media.

Understand me now?


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 Post subject: Re: Update
PostPosted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 2:21 pm 
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Posts: 369
I still think the restrictions on the /cache volume will prove to be too much (too small and local or too slow and over the network), since that's supposed to be a fast-access volume for spooling recordings.

My suggestion would be to create a master backend and then use a harddisk-less Knoppmyth CD-booted system as the frontend in the area you want to keep quiet.

-brendan


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:52 pm 
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Joined: Fri May 21, 2004 11:55 pm
Posts: 1206
Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Couldn't you boot off the microdrive (or compact flash for that matter) instead of the CDROM? That'd make a nice installation. Fast, quiet booting and you wouldn't have to dig out the boot CD every time you start the frontend (presuming the CD drive does double-duty for DVD and CD media for the frontend.)

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Apr 23, 2005 3:24 pm 
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Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2003 7:05 pm
Posts: 5088
Location: Fontana, Ca
You should be able to install to a 2 Gig microdrive. You'll want to do a manaul install... Just create / and a swap (75 megs).

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 Post subject: Thats what I thought
PostPosted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 4:00 pm 
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Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:39 pm
Posts: 19
Location: State College, PA
Liv2Cod wrote:
Couldn't you boot off the microdrive (or compact flash for that matter) instead of the CDROM? That'd make a nice installation. Fast, quiet booting and you wouldn't have to dig out the boot CD every time you start the frontend (presuming the CD drive does double-duty for DVD and CD media for the frontend.)


Yeah, thats what I was thinking... all the cache would be on the network NFS server. I don't want to boot from a slot noisy disc.

So looks... like manual install with a 75mb swap. Kickass... Thanks


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 Post subject: Re: Thats what I thought
PostPosted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 5:58 pm 
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Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 12:04 pm
Posts: 369
aventius wrote:
Yeah, thats what I was thinking... all the cache would be on the network NFS server. I don't want to boot from a slot noisy disc.

So looks... like manual install with a 75mb swap. Kickass... Thanks


I still suspect you're going to have problems recording on the backend if its /cache volume is a network resource and not local.

FWIW, a bit of hdparm magic made my boot HD pretty darn quiet.

-brendan


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Apr 26, 2005 12:29 am 
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Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2004 3:23 am
Posts: 159
Location: Friesland, The Netherlands
You could even consider not using a disk at all. Initially I had a R4V5 backend / frontend in my living room. At some point I transferred the harddisk and tuner card to a different machine and disabled the frontend by booting into runlevel 3. Then I read through various docs on the Internet regarding diskless setups. I used busybox to create a lean and mean root filesystem and mount /usr (ro) and /myth (rw) over NFS. I use the kernel / modules that shipped with R4V5. Since I kept all the configuration files of the backend / frontend install in the living room I had a working lircd.conf (homebrew receiver), XF86Config-4, asound.state and knew which modules had to be loaded to support the hardware. The motherboard and NIC I use don't support PXE booting, but that was solved by creating a EtherBoot boot ROM. You need plenty of RAM for such a setup. I think 512 MB is the minimum since it cannot swap to disk. All in all a very interesting project. Learnt a lot from it and the reward is a very quiet PC in the living room. I copied this setup and now I can also boot my laptop over the network thus creating an extra frontend leaving the contents of the (work)laptop harddisk intact.


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