[mythtv-users] network drive for music

Gavin Haslett gavin at nodecaf.net
Thu May 5 17:43:06 UTC 2005


The only times you'll hit a problem with this sort of setup are (a) times of heavy network and/or CPU utilization and (b) if your file server goes down!
 
The reason for (a) is that SMB is actually a very "heavy" protocol; that is it has a lot of stuff that gets wired across the network with the actual data. It's stuff that's required for Windows networking (broadcast information, host information and so forth) but if your network's slow or you have a lot of hosts using it then you might have a problem.
 
(b) Caused me some grief when I first set up my Mythbox. I set up fileshares on my Windows fileserver for my MP3 collection and at first it worked OK (though to be honest cataloguing the MP3's was sort of painful). I ran with this on 0.17 and it worked great until my fileserver went down. My Mythbox didn't completely freeze, but the mythfrontend died. SSHing from another machine I found mythfrontend eating all my CPU cycles so I killed it (had to -9 the bugger). Even once my fileserver was back though, the share wouldn't remount, had to bounce my mythbox.
 
My solution? UNIX Services for Windows... which I already had installed. It was free anyway. Well, I set up my MP3's as an NFS share instead, and put an entry in my /etc/fstab to mount it (soft) on boot. Since I was also upgrading to 0.18 and didn't have any significant recordings I trashed the database and allowed it a clean rebuild. Well, it all came up and running the catalog of MP3's was at least twice as fast if not better. And when I lost my fileserver again (I really need to replace the battery in that UPS <grin>) my mythmusic just stopped playing. I could return back up to the main menu with no problems... SSHing in from the backend showed some errors in /var/log/messages about the share vanishing. When the server came back online, voila. The share remounted, and Myth just kept chugging along.
 
I'm a firm believer in using UNIX protocols on a UNIX-like operating system wherever possible. They tend to be better supported and standards based. Plus I found the Windows Services for UNIX were excellent.
 
Just my 2c... hope it helps.

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org on behalf of Dean Collins 
	Sent: Thu 5/5/2005 11:59 AM 
	To: Geoff Scott; Discussion about mythtv 
	Cc: 
	Subject: RE: [mythtv-users] network drive for music
	
	

	Thanks geoff, I got tied up last night so never implemented it but
	thanks for letting me know this is the right idea.
	
	Cheers,
	Dean
	
	
	> -----Original Message-----
	> From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org [mailto:mythtv-users-
	> bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of Geoff Scott
	> Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 12:56 PM
	> To: Discussion about mythtv
	> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] network drive for music
	>
	> On 5/4/05, Dean Collins <Dean at collins.net.pr> wrote:
	> > Thanks for that, this is the page I found, looks plausible with a
	> > cursory look - will reply to the list later if I get it to work (/
	or
	> > need more help).
	> >
	> >
	http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Filesystems/Mounting_smbfs_Shares_Permanent
	> > ly.html
	> >
	> > Cheers,
	> > Dean
	> >
	>
	> I actually am doing this with my music, pictures, and video.  I mount
	> the M$ shares (winvideo, winpictures, and winmusic) at boot with
	> commands in rc.local through Samba, as was suggested earlier in this
	> thread.  They get mounted to directories in /mnt.  I then can symlink
	> to them.  I symlink mainly for videos, because when I rip a DVD, it
	> goes into the directory on the MythBox I specified for videos (/rip).
	> At least in prior versions of MythTV, you could not define mulitple
	> locations for videos, so I just put a symlink in my movie directory
	> (/rip) to the proper /mnt samba share... and I got everything in on
	> the MythVideo menu.
	>
	> I could also bind mount (mount -o bind ....) the M$ share into the
	> proper directory, but I'm lazy the way I have it set up now works fine
	> for me.
	>
	> Works great.
	>
	> gs
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