[mythtv-users] Using SLUG as primary backend

[Brian Wood]

On Saturday 28 June 2008 20:27:01 Aaron Klein wrote:
> Im getting into Mythtv.  Right now I have a P4 HT 3.0 as my primary
> backend with a frontend.  I only have 1 tuner (Leadtek 2000 XP) but I
> hope to upgrade to multiple PVR cards.  In addition I have a secondary
> front end currently setup as a secondary backend aswell with no
> tuners.  That system is a P4 2.8 No HT.  I plan on dropping some PVR
> tuners in that system aswell.  I am planning on having 1 system in the
> bedroom and one in the living room.  Now to my question.  I saw that
> you can put MythTV on a linksys slug and set it up as a master
> backend.  I can see some real benifits to this as right now if I have
> the primary system down the secondary system is useless since it cant
> get to the DB.  I am curious  if there are any negitives to having the
> slug as the primary backend.  I would suspect all the recordings would
> end up being stored on the particular system they where recorded on
> and any transcoding would be done on those systems aswell.  Is the
> slug basicly just a place to store the DB and run the normal DB update
> queries from?  Can you still stream recordings with mythweb if the
> slug is the primary backend?

The slug is a useful device, I have four of them.

Don't try using it as a maser B/E though. The main problem for a B/E is slow 
I/O, especially for HD. The USB ports are not very efficient, and they have 
non-standard power as well (you can run a slug from power fed back from a 
powered device, you shouldn't be able to do that ).

Also, the slug does not have a floating point unit, which really slows down FP 
intensive apps. Transcoding and probably commflagging would be a crawl.

Adding RAM (fattening) is difficult at best, and the standard RAM is very 
limited.

Play with it if you like, don't expect too much. They do make great little 
light-duty servers, and a lot of folks are running Asterisk on them. Lots of 
other things you can do with them, but if you have one you probably already 
know that :-)

beww