[mythtv-users] Anyone successfully use a hacked NAS box as a backend?

Mark Small msmall at eastlink.ca
Wed Sep 8 19:39:37 UTC 2010


On September 8, 2010 13:37:42 Joe wrote:
> My current combined FE/BE just had a hardware failure - power supply
> died I suspect.  A replacement is on the way, but in the meantime I
> got this idea.  There are lots of these NAS boxes around, and many run
> embedded linux and seem pretty hackable (nas-central.org).  Has anyone
> successfully hacked and used one of these as a master backend?
>
> There was a recent thread about using a Sheevaplug as a master BE,
> possibly using a NAS for storage.  But if the NAS already has
> sufficient processing power itself, seems like you could get all
> functionality without the need for the plug at all.  If that works,
> then I could set up my current combined FE/BE as a slave backend (it
> has an additional PVR-150 tuner and enough horsepower to run commflag
> jobs).
>
> The objective here being that I could then shut the slave BE
> down/sleep it when nothing is going on to save some power.  I imagine
> the NAS boxes are relatively power efficient, especially if I can
> successfully spin down the drive(s) when not recording.  Probably uses
> a lot less energy than leaving my current (Athlon X2-5200 based) FE/BE
> on 24/7.
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My MBE is a QNAP TS219P NAS.  Works pretty well, though database operations 
are much slower than they were on a Turion.  All other functions of this box 
(see the plug computing thread) work great.  I also have a USB tuner though 
I'm not using it at the moment (need a new STB). 

If you pick a NAS that can already run Debian (see 
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/), then it is really very easy.  Just don't try 
to use an xfs filesystem since it just plain doesn't work on ARM.  The 
biggest problem is that the QNAP NAS's that tend to work best also tend to be 
rather expensive.  

Mark



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