Hi all,<br><br><br> I just made a few additions to my myth system, and I have a few questions. To give a brief overview of my setup, I have a single Master Backend running on a older P4 2.8ghz machine with a 400mzh FSB, 1GB rambus memmory, and 3x ATA133 hard drives (a 120gb for recording, 40gb for the OS, and a 60gb I use for other things). It currently has a PVR-250 and a PVR-500. This machine is running Ubuntu
7.10 i386. I also have a 500gb drive with my DVD rips, music, etc which is shared via NFS on my main desktop machine (also running Ubuntu 7.10 i386). Obviously, I use this for SD only. My feed is my local Time Warner Cable, and it costs me $10/month on top of my Roadrunner account for this access. My main question here is what to do now that I'm expanding. I just got my hands on a couple of eMacs (800mhz, 2nd edition) which seem to work well as frontends when running a stripped down copy of OS X
10.4.11 (and they even look like a TV). I use these in addition to my main front end (in my living room), which is running on a P4 1.7ghz IBM netvista desktop machine, with a 5200FX with tv-out, on Mythbuntu. I have this all connected via 100mbit lan. I should also mention that I have a wife that likes to watch live TV.
<br><br>So now that I have all these frontends, a situation arose where I needed another tuner last night. My wife couldn't watch project runway while recording her other shows while I recorded scrubs. To resolve this, I just bought another PVR-500 so I will have 5 tuners in total. My question regards how to arrange all of this.
<br><br>I'm already using my main desktop to serve my movies, music, etc (since my main system can't handle a SATA drive without adding a card). I also use my Main Backend as a frontend when I'm using my desktop machine, and I'd rather not lose that ability. I'm out of PCI slots in that machine, so if I add another tuner to that machine, I'll lose my sound card. Also, the machine only has USB
1.1, so a USB tuner seems out of the question (and I already bought my third PCI tuner)<br><br>So what I'm proposing is that I could turn my desktop machine into a secondary backend, install my new tuner in that machine, so I'll only have 3 and 2 tuners per machine. My question is where the recordings will be held. I'd prefer that my recordings were all on the same drive, regardless of the tuners used to record them. So would I be able to record on my desktop machine, and save the recordings on my main backend? What would happen if my desktop machine were shut down, how well does Myth handle secondary servers going on/off-line? I realize this will be a bit of an I/O nightmare, will I be any better off using my desktop to host a tuner but recording on the Main Backend anyway? Should I just ditch the sound card in the backend and set my desktop machine to run with dual heads, and run mythfrontend on one of those? Should I setup a LVM and combine my 120GB drive and my 60GB drive in a JBOD style setup? Would this offer any advantage in I/O terms?
<br><br>I hope this makes sense, please let me know if I need to clarify something. And again, I'm just looking for suggestions on how to arrange this hardware while I wait for my new tuner to arrive in the next week or so. I'm sure some of you out there have faced similar dilemmas. The only thing I'm sure of is that I'm keeping my main desktop my main desktop (which is a Pentium D, Sata, 3GB of ram...much more powerful system) Any advice would be appreciated.
<br><br>Josh<br>