[mythtv-users] Diskless

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Sun Feb 11 23:05:01 UTC 2007


Richard Stanaford wrote:
>
>
> On 2/5/07, *Rich West* <Rich.West at wesmo.com 
> <mailto: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*

Heh.. I think I didn't get out what I really meant which was to use the 
quad cards to provide another network so the mythtv boxes reside on both 
my "internal" and my "myth" networks, all managed through the layer 3 
switch. :)

-Rich



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