[mythtv-users] Diskless

[Richard Stanaford]

On 2/5/07, Rich West <Rich.West at wesmo.com> wrote:
>
> Trey Thompson wrote:
> > One thing to consider, an option I've used in commercial applications
> > many times, is to not use a hub/switch between the Front Ends and Back
> > End for the main streaming.  This could be difficult if you're doing
> > any storage on the Front Ends (slave backend), but if you're not, it
> > should work great.
> >
> > You could get something like a 4 port PCI NIC card, and then have a
> > direct CAT5 run to each of the Diskless Frontends.
> >
> > That would sure give you MORE than enough bandwidth to do whatever you
> wanted.
> >
> > Then, you could even use normal NICs in the frontends for Internet,
> > whatever, and keep one in the FE dedicated to the backend.  Never have
> > that traffic hit your "LAN".
> >
> > But, obviously, this is overkill unless you've got something like 5 HD
> > front ends, and a busy network.
>
> Well.. I had actually considered that since I do have a couple of quad
> cards hanging around doing nothing.  The temptation is definitely there
> to have a separate network just for the mythtv boxes.. but, I think you
> are right, for a home environment it would be overkill.
>
> -Rich



Ugh.  The quad-cards make me a little nervous.  :-)  First of all, Rich, if
you are interested in having your MythTV network be separate, I would assume
your Layer 3 switch is capable of doing VLANs.  Something to consider.

I've never had my hands on a quad-card, but I would assume that the four
ports are not switched through the hardware logic of the card, which might
suggest that each port would be considered it's own network.  So you'd, in
effect, have three two-node networks (one for each front-end).  So now, in
the event you might want the FE's to see each other, you've moved from Layer
2 Fast Ethernet to a Layer 3 network with your back-end as the router, which
could eat up resources at high data rates.

That would be interesting to test and play around with, though.  *grin*

Take care,
-Rich
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