So about 3 months ago I finally got tired of having two servers sitting next to each other not really doing much of anything and decided to consolidate the two. I moved my web, email and file server all over onto my fairly stable knoppmyth install. Didn't take much, update apache, installed postfix etc... Now i'm contemplating trying to upgrade the mythtv package on it, but before the apt-get fun begins I wanted to check around and see just how bad of an idea this might be. How much of the mythtv source and supplemental packages and libraries are customized? Has anybody tried this with R5C7? I'm not looking to update the whole system, I really just want to update MythTv and it's dependencies. Any input/shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.

My tentative suggestion is:

1. Install VMWare Server somewhere, anywhere (easy, see the Wiki)
2. Install a server appliance of choice (I use Ubuntu Server), and reinstall/reconfigure your apache, postfix etc. to migrate the server functionality to the VM. This is the big one-time pain for long term gain.
3. Upgrade your KnoppMyth in the conventional way
4. Install VMWare Server on the new KM install
5. Move/restart your VM onto the KM box

The big advantage of this setup is that every time you want to upgrade Knoppmyth, there's just one post-install task to do: install VMWare Server. After that, you just restart your server VM. You can even host your server VM on another machine, like a desktop, while the KnoppMyth upgrade is happening. It just generally keeps your 2 worlds of MythTv and servers nearly independent.

You also don't have to try to harden the essentially insecure KnoppMyth distribution in any way to make it open to the evil world of the internet.

The biggest caveat to this, is that VMWare could interfere with the essentially real-time nature of MythTv. But that's true of your web/mail server anyway. As you can see on the Wiki, I renice my VMs, to try to prevent them doing this. I'm not 100% convinced it's problem-free, as I'm getting audio sync problems. I still have to shut down vmware for a bit to see if the problem goes away. My VMs are now reniced to 19, so they really shouldn't interfere with anything.

I've got 3 VMs running most of the time: 1 web/mail, 1 bittorrent (TorrentFlux), and one Slimserver. Total mem usage is ~512MB, CPU minimal.

The only real drawback i see to that method is that it will forces me to duplicate a few of the more heavily used features (mythweb, ssh/user accounts, and samba) across the VM and the knoppmyth/host machine install. It is an interesting solution and i'll have to give it further thought. I guess my next question is what would be the major differences/drawbacks to installing mythtv on a standard debian/ubuntu install? Has anyone tried it?