Media Server

I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

Now on the the WD I'd had to set the jumper on the back to limit the drive to SATA I (150Gbit/s) in order for my old Asus/Nvidia socket 754 motherboard to recognise it. It runs quiet and cool and should I need to replace it it'd probably be a bigger power supply, a new case, and PCI Express graphics card. This would be expensive and overkill when the Nvidia FX5200 graphics card is perfectly adequate for displaying digital TV. I digress.

The new samsung disk requires one to use their software (ES-Tool, well hidden on their website and the kind of thing that expects you not to need a manual) to adjust drive settings. The problem is the computer needs to be able to detect the disk before the software can adjust the settings, but when the problem is the computer can't detect the disk in the first place there's a bit of a problem. The software in question is a dos-based bootable CD. I try using the the much newer PC in my room, that can't boot the CD, something to do with an out of memory error. This might be something to do with said PC being a modern multi-core multi-GPU 64-bit machine. It can, however, communicate with the disk so I know it works. My trusty Dell Precision is similarly too old to cope with the new disk.

Finally I get both the disk and the setup software running on my mum's desktop, which appears to finally have a feature that's made it really useful. It's an early EMT-64 capable 3Ghz P4, not as fast or as economical or as stable as anything else in the house but today the damn thing redeemed itself. I, on the other hand, need a small dose of public ridicule for not checking how to set the drive to 150Gbit/s before ordering it.

Having complained lots, it is very quiet, draws very little power, and and is more than quick enough to serve as a repository for myth recordings, however it'll be obsolete by the time I can tell you whether I think mine's reliable.

Apparently I've been recording through MythTV for 2 years as of today. Maybe a month or so on another machine beforehand, but 2 years of PVR goodness needs some stats to go with it.

Number of shows: 410
Number of episodes: 1625
First recording: Friday November 10th, 2006
Last recording: Monday November 10th, 2008
Total Running Time: 1 year 11 months 30 days 1 hr 51 mins
Total Recorded: 2 months 11 days 3 hrs 4 mins
Percent of time spent recording: 9%

Currently Stored: 229 programs, using 187 GB (15 days 20 hrs 4 mins) out of 234 GB (43 GB free).

Ever shutdown/rebooted the wrong machine through ssh+carelessness? molly-guard comes to the rescue, asking you to type the hostname of the machine you intend to shut down if it detects you are connected by ssh. It's packaged for and available in the main repositories Debian and Ubuntu, I don't know about any other distros.

An example:

[sudo] password for charles:
W: molly-guard: SSH session detected!
Please type in hostname of the machine to reboot: lucifer

Broadcast message from charles@lucifer
(/dev/pts/0) at 17:44 ...

The system is going down for reboot NOW!

At some point in the past, cable boxes were simple things that just changed channel, now they have a whole host of different states like on demand that can really confuse mythtv.

I've set up channel 109 (which is On Demand Preview on the Virgin box) to put the box into on-demand mode, giving mythtv a way of knowing the cable box is doing something other than displaying one of the conventional channels. It relies on users using channel 109 to switch to On-Demand mode, so isn't perfect, but it seems to work.

Getting out of most of the other states the box could be in can be done by sending the TV then Select buttons, and whilst it'll kick users off of on demand without warning, it means that mythtv gets to record what it wants.

Overly hot hard disks are bad. I think we all know that. It doesn't stop us worrying about our data, but a problem can't be fixed unless we know it's a problem. Opening cases and touching hard drive to see if they are hot is the most low tech of approaches, but it's cheap and completely cross platform.

There are those that would have you believe making samba work is a black art. On the flipside of this are a number of GUI options for configuring samba that make it very very quick to shoot yourself in the foot. I'm going to try and run through a few key points that I end up explaining repeatedly, and try and record the snippets I keep having to look up because I'm not infallible.

NFS is somewhat handy when you need to share stuff between multiple unix-like machines. Unlike CIFS/SMB/Samba, NFS is suitable for applications where unix style file permissions and case-sensitive behaviour are required. It's quite commonly used for sharing home folders in a homogeneous network, and for providing system images for diskless clients.

Changing the hostname of anything that's been near mythtv is a pain in the ass. There's a howto using an offline copy of the data that I probably should have followed, but I didn't so after giving myself a world of problems, I'm going to try and work with the data online with phpMyAdmin. Seriously hardcore users could go with an interactive mysql session, but it's not amazing for browsing data quickly. Watch out for name collisions though, lucifer, my new backend used to run as a frontend, so using the method above I'd have to do the following 3 way swap.

I have 3 nights worth of transcoding* stacked up and they've all failed due to looking for mythtranscode in the wrong place (/bin to be precise). Possibly a fault casued by using the old mythconverg database** on a new server. I go investigate...

My old media box was dying of cruft. After several years of repeated upgrades, repeated breakage, indecisiveness and having pretty much every package I liked the sound of installed, I decided to start with a clean install, using less awkward and less power-hungry hardware.

Getting something halfway workable didn't take long. Mythbuntu makes it so easy to get MythTV up and running. And then there's just a bit of tweaking to do. It's the just a bit of tweaking that I think warrants further study, It's been interesting living with MythTV and the way it's changed the way I live, so I'm going to keep a diary of the tweaks and swearing related to the new box.