Things are too stable here at my house... My KnoppMyth box has been running without problems now for weeks. I just got a couple of additional pcHDTV cards and I'm thinking of setting up a separate "master" backend and making my current FE/BE box a "slave" backend.

For my new master BE I have a dual Athlon MP 2000 computer with 200G and 250G drives. I thought I'd put in the new pcHDTV cards and a gigibit LAN card. The dual processors might help with commercial flagging, no? Otherwise it would be overkill to have this much horsepower for a backend server. I have another dual MP box with 1200s I could use if commercial flagging isn't an issue.

So I thought I'd go ahead and set up my new MBE with KnoppMyth, making it a FE/BE system. Then I'll go in and edit things so the frontend doesn't always start, add LVM, and patch things for the new pcHDTV 3000 cards. I'm expecing trouble when I get to the part where I make my current FE/BE system into a slave BE. Hopefully I will have searched enough here and in Gossamer when I get to that point.

I'm also assuming I have to recompile the kernel to take advantage of the dual processors. It probably isn't common enough to have precompiled debs for this configuration on the KnoppMyth distro!

Any words of wisdom or pearls of advice before I roll up my sleeves and make a fool of myself?

Joe Barnhart

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...from Mastery The Keys to Success and Long-term Fulfillment by George Leonard.

The willingness to make a fool of oneself is required to learn and master new skills.

I have yet to set up a slave back end. I would recomend docomenting the steps you take to convert your current front end/back end system into a slave back end, and remote front end to your new system. The Wiki would be a great place for that, though posting your experience here often results in that experience being transfered over to Xsecret's wiki as well.

-Rusty

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Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)

I am a bit curious about one aspect of the setup you are talking about.

I presume your current master system does not have HDTV cards. If you do have a (or multiple) HDTV card in this box, forget about the rest of this message. Perhaps it has something like a couple of pvr250's, or a 250 and a 350 being used for video out to a TV.

In any case I seem to recall that the recording process when there are multiple recordings going on at the same time is Program 1 <= Card 1 from master, Program 2 <= Card 1 from Slave, Program 3 <= card 2 of slave [ continuing through all cards in slave] Program N (two greater than number of cards in slaves) <= Card 2 from master, etc through the last card on the master.

My concern would be material that is available to both master and slave, (local chanels for example) that would look better recorded from HDTV, being recorded instead in NTSC because something else is already being recorded on the master and NTSC cards are available on the slave(s).

I presume if you are using cable on the slave box, and OTA antenas for the master box, you would deselect the local channels from your slave backend's available options, and hope that you never need to record from more local channels than you have HDTV cards in the master.

In any case, good luck with the setup.

-Rusty

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Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)

Instead of adding it as the new master, why not add it as a slave? It would be easier and you can use LinHES as a guide. Here are the steps I'd take if you choose to continue:

1. mythbackup on current MB/FE.
2. Install KnoppMyth on new MBE, giving it the same name as current MB/FE.
3. Configure as needed, LVM, etc.
4. Once complete, copy contents of /myth/backup to new MBE.
5. Are you going to keep the shows on old MB/FE? If not, copy to new MBE. If you are, you'll have to modify db to reflect new location in file system (easier to copy).
6. mythrestore on MBE.
7. Change hostname on SB/FE(old MB/FE).
8. You can probably follow LinHES now....

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

In a sense I have it simple. All my capture cards are pcHDTV cards, I have one model 2000 and two 3000s. I have the 2000 in my current FE/BE system and I plan to put the two 3000s into the new MBE. I'm giving cesman's idea serious consideration -- keep my current FE/BE as "master" and make a new slave backend. Maybe that would be less disruptive at present. I just had the idea that I'd like the "big box in the closet" as the MBE and the "set top box" (which may become "boxes" someday) as slave(s).

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