[mythtv-users] feature request for a backup recording location and db incase of a master server failure

[Chris Germano]

Is there any option to specify a secondary location for recording? I think this is rather important for someone with multiple drives who doesn't want to mess with them in terms of combining partitions or using RAID. In the future I will be created a remote wireless (54G) mythfrontend and slave backend for my family room and it will be set to record to my master server. There should be an option to set a secondary location (say localy) to record incase it cannot access the other one just since my server cannot be reached or has a full disk because of say a wireless hickup or something. I think I might have heard about a script that did something like this before, in the sense of finding a master backend on the network that had free space, but not sure if that ever made it's way into the released Myth. Some good coding along with this should handle it nicely but as of yet I don't see this built in.. any reason why not?

There is another problem that I have neglected is the fact that the remote myth will be sharing the master SQL database and I guess it wouldn't solve anything if it can't connect with it to begin with. Anyway this would be another area for some improvement. Integrate a thread into myth that listens for the connection of the DB, makes periodic backups of it localy and if the main connection should fail it could switch over to the local copy. It would have to have some kind of master overide setup (and AI) for when it connects again to merge the tables but this would allow the networked myths to be more reliable and independent if something happens to the server. I also recommend having it notify visually, like an alert that states the database hasn't synced up in a while or something like that if this feature is every implemented. Don't say this is a waste of time because having two seperate databases really sucks and defeats the whole purpose of mythtv's networkability interface for sharing records and tuners.

By the way if you guys are wondering about 54G cards, I'm running a Netgear WG511 on Gentoo. I just installed the drivers for it the other day and it works better in linux than it ever did in Windows, no jk (Netgear makes crappy drivers). If you also have a Intersil Prism based chipset you can get drivers at www.prism54.org but beware the installation and readme are terrible since it's pretty new. As for myth, I emerged the Myth (0.12 is in the portages) and connected right up to my server. I can playback anything perfectly and even watch my Live TV that is set at MPEG4 6000Mbps. My card, and in general 54G itself can handle between 12-21Mbps of true bandwidth with an average of about 16 so it's perfect for anything Myth can dish out. However it probably couldn't handle over 3 remote myths at the same time watching live video on wireless, heh.   
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