I have a general question to see if something is at all possible...
Say you have a backend, with limited PCI slots, and they are taken up by tuners, IDE cards (for extra hard disks/optical drives), video cards...
Say you put some additional tuners or have firewire ports in your front ends. Is it possible to somehow use the hardware on the frontend to record?

Don't know about the firewire, but you can place tuners in your frontends and use them. What you want is a slave backend - See http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... ckendHowTo