[mythtv-users] combined myth/server

[Travis Tabbal]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 8:39 PM, <glenhawk at optusnet.com.au> wrote:

>
> I have been considering the same thing because an "always-on" low power
> server is attractive. The only major thing holding me back is not being able
> to install my PCI HDTV cards in it. I have found one ION board with a PCI
> slot (Zotec I think) and I could put my dual tuner in it and then have a
> secondary backend for a couple more tuners when needed.
> I also haven't taken the plunge yet because my P4 backend is still ticking
> over with all 4 Tuners (3 cards) in it and a gigabit LAN card. If it dies I
> may look into an ION server but I have a dual core desktop about to retire
> with 3x PCI and 3x PCIe (and about 5 SATA and two IDE channels) screaming to
> be used as a combination server/backend/desktop.
> By the time that system dies (touch-wood) the ION will probably have
> evolved into something else.
>


I didn't bother with low power CPUs and such, outside of getting a newer
chip that OpenSolaris can use powernow with. My biggest reason was that the
14 HDDs in the box far outstrip the power use of the CPU and motherboard. :)
I'm also doing virtualization on that machine, so I needed something with
more grunt than an Atom. For a general fileserver and Myth BE, I don't see a
problem other than that comflagging and transcoding jobs will really bog
down the CPU, not leaving much for managing the storage and network traffic.
If you either don't run those jobs on that machine, or if you don't mind
that, it should work fine. You could also schedule those jobs to run when
you aren't planning to use the server for other things. Or, if you have
other machines on the network that you don't mind using cycles on, you could
let them do those jobs. So many options with Myth. :)

Personally, I wouldn't put drives and such in an FE box. It gets noisy fast.
Not only from the drives, but the fans to keep everything cool. Modern
drives put out a fair bit of heat. Put the drives and fans in a BE hidden in
the basement, garage, closet, whatever. Then netboot the ION FEs over
gigabit. :)

Oh, and do yourself a favor and use a separate disk for the OS and database.
I didn't do that the first time out and ended up having to change things
around. An old 40G IDE drive worked great for that, then I dedicated the
500G SATA drive to recordings and solved some irritating drop-outs in
recordings. Don't skimp on RAM either, particularly if you are going to
attempt an FE install on that box as you will want to dedicate 512M to video
for VDPAU.
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