[mythtv-users] Looking for advice, network rearchitecture

[Ryan Steffes]

I've grown my little home television network hodge-podge for a while
now revolving and I think I've gotten to the point where I should
probably stop and think about what I'm doing.  I've had a few
frustrating and badly timed lock ups on my main television computer,
and because it's the master, they are fatal to my system.  I've also
shoved way too many drives into the  HTPC style case my main machine
runs in, resulting what I've now deemed to be unacceptable grinding
from the case when it's going hard and too much fan noise to control
the temperature.

What I'd like to do is turn the left over parts I have into a remote
storage server that can be tucked away.  I want to design the thing to
be rock solid and to function as the file and mysql server, and
tunerless master backend (with no commflagging or transcoding on this
machine).  I'm most comfortable with Mandriva Linux, but the last
couple of releases have felt kludgy to me for the streamlined machine
I'm envisioning.  I'm thinking of going with Ubuntu for that reason.
I didn't want to have to install X on this machine at all; will having
X installed be necessary to run mythtv-setup remotely?

For what I want it to do, I don't think I need to have a particularly
powerful machine to handle the load.  Currently, my masterbackend has
four hard drives and the CDROM in it, with two PVR150s recording to
local drives.  My remote backend has two drives and a A180 recording
locally.  I'd leave the remote machine alone, and move the database to
the remote PC along with the storage drives.  I would essentially move
the master system from the current master to the new file server, sans
tuners, and put replace it with a small system only drive.

My main questions from people who have more experience setting up file
servers like this is whether my assumptions about hardware
requirements are reasonable.  The available system I have is a 2.4
Athlon with a little over half a gig of RAM with a built in 100Mbs
NIC.  I believe that should be sufficient, since only two PVR150s will
be writing to that system at any given time, even with multiple
commflagging and transcoding jobs going on and up to three frontends
reading.  Also, is Ubuntu a good choice as a streamlined server, or
should I delve further into the waters of Debian or Gentoo?

Thanks for any advice,

Ryan