[mythtv] Re: Client-Server hardware arch questions?

[Mark Chou]

Issac,

I want to make sure that I've got this right.  In theory, I should be 
capable of netbooting from NFS, a *diskless* client to run slaved 
backend and frontend processes that's local to the thin client.   This 
implies I only need to administrate only the NFS server (possibly w/ 
some XF86Config files local to the thin clients).

Any estimates what housepower(memory) would be necessary?

 > > > You can do both, actually.  The backend will stream the file on 
the fly to
 > > > the frontend for playback using TCP, but if you NFS mount the the
 > > > recording directories so they're in the same place on the 
frontends as
 > > > they are on the backend, it'll use that instead.  Currently, only TV
 > > > recordings are frontend/backend aware, but I hope to change that 
sometime
 > > > after the next release.
 > >
 > > I've been curious about this as well.. So is it possible to have a 
beefy
 > > backend  comp with two or more video cards, lots of disk space, etc,
 > > and then have "thin clients" for the TV frontends, with the only real
 > > requirements being TV-out?  For example, the frontends would only need
 > > to have 100mbit ethernet, a vid card w/ tv out, and a tiny hardrive (or
 > > ramdisk?) for the OS, right? If so, that would be incredible!

 > Yup.  That was the whole point of the multi-month long rewrite of the
 > internals for the 0.8 release =)  Remote frontends are incredibly 
easy to
 > setup, too.  All you have to do (beyond having a working linux 
install, etc)
 > is to compile mythtv, edit mysql.txt to point to the mysql server 
that it's
 > sharing with the backends, and run mythfrontend.  Everything else is 
done
 > totally automatically.

 > Isaac