Rantville

I might come back to my rather long absence, but thats for another post. This post has been a draft for many months, and I dont care to rewrite it all… So live with the edits or more along.

I used to be a hefty user of MythTV when I had analog cable, but since moving back to hillbillie-ville, sky where my limit.. and what a leap that is my friends!
I had been a cable user for so long that I had missed out on my lil bros & dads sat hook-ups back at the farm where we grew up. Since moving back to one of the 3 houses on the farm Ive used it as a “playground” for many an interresting project. There is some docu of that in the wiki & forum, but I, like most of us hate that part of any project, no?

One thing Ive always missed since going digital(DVB-S), is the web frontend of MythTV. Its far beyond anything Ive used/seen, its dead on for the tasks given. Scheduling more so than anything, its simply superb.

There are many reasons for going embedded with a PVR solution, ease of use being one of them.
Granted, you get away with perty much the same bang for the buck if you build your own PVR box. That is, if you cant recycle some oldish hardware. Which Im in the process of doing(again), swapping out useful parts from my old DAW box..
I’ll add any decent DVB-S PCI Tuner I can get ahold of on the used marked. So far there arent many used cards to scour up here in .no, but the prices on new DVB-S budget cards are fairly reasonable. Ive been sniffing on a couple of Hauppauge Hybrid cards;

HVR-3000 (Analogue/DVB-S/-T)
HVR-4000 (Analogue/DVB-S/S2/-T)

The latest development on the HVR-4000 seem to indicate all works with S2 as a experimental? Its last diff against the v4l dvb where released the 26th Dec 2007(yes perty recent).

The rest of my equipment aint HD capable yet(recycled in -00), but its a non issue for me. Whats available of HDTV content via DVB-S2 aint much to brag about, and it will most likely be non-existent on DVB-T. So my focus will be DVB-S content.
There are currently a mix of DM 500, DM 7020 & analog airial at the farm, with various PVR solutions. The goal in this setup is to give them all a PVR backend(one DVB-S per house), with easy access via either the web or the mythfrontend. Will explore various setups on the client-side of things.

Frank and I both share a few commons in these setups, MythTV(what?!) & DVB. Where its pretty straight forward on DVB-C(no pun tended), it takes a sober man at the wheel to config a 4 x LNB(2xTwin+2xQuad) for the first time.. Im in the process of reading up on DiSEqC commands, had a issue with two of the ports in a 4:1 DiSEqC(v1.0). Believe its related to Tone/v, but havent been able to test yet.

EDIT 11/01:
My new years deed will be to do better in documenting what I dig myself into. The before mentioned bandidos have kicked it off in this
wiki entry (feel free to contrib with your setup).
That link will be the ref for any details, only rants in this post..

Today Chris1(a polish friend of the family) and I where in each our ladder replacing LNBs & DiSEqCs. It went very smoothly, took apart the LNB-”pole” from the dish & swapped LNBs inside the house. We where very careful in not adjusting the angle of the LNB mounts. Only one of the heads(1W) needed a little tweak to get rid of a tiny Bering jump on some of the transponders.

EDIT 15/1

While the chiefs of weather heavily argues summer/winter on a daily basis, Ive enjoyed*caugh* monkey work in the myth db. Changing xmltvid, checking the best alternative(s) for the epg feeds & general cleanup.

To spark up the mood I setup a VIA EPIA 800a(disk less) to boot via PXE(tftp+nfs). I had forgotten the age of this little beauty(EPIA) so in my haze it didnt sink in how in the shitter I was due to the Trident card thats onboard.. It might be used as a surfing terminal at some point, but mythfrontend it shall not. Unless I happen to trip over a good pci card with optional tv-out(considering to build a vga-scart adapter and save some hassle).
I got a PVR-350 stashed somewhere, but I recall how shady its tv-out was, not sure I care to take it for another spin.

Anyway, my problems with the mythfrontend seems solved, a kind soul is “donating” a much newer EPIA-EK 1000G(see wiki).

I asked my lil sis to be a middle (wo)man. Buying 2 Skystar2 cards from Sweden, that will arrive by the end of the month I hope.
It was a dead-end to get ahold of any used quality dvb-s cards, I comfort myself that the NOK still beats the SEK.

EDIT 19/1

I got the new EPIA yesterday, it works fine as a frontend. It has however a nasty side-effect in its current setup(PXE+NFS boot). Any video playback takes +5secs to buffer up compared to my EEE(via wlan). Suffice to say, this is not tolerable, I can live with 2-3sec, but this is a nogo. In-menu navigation is quick enough tho.
I’ll try out boot via CF, Live CD & 2.5″ HDD and note down any diffs.
IR Remote is ordered, so only remaining HW part is the VGA to Scart adapter.

EDIT 23/4

Woohoo.. 3 months of slacking? Not really, its just not enough hours in a day. Anyyyway. For completion, and to get one of my stack of drafts posted, let me sum up status quo.

Myth backend now runs on a AMD64 x2, it has 3 DVB-S cards and has filled up the raid array(1.4TB) to the brim since the last edit. All works as it should on the BE. Had some instability, but that was tracked down to a fubar memory stick.(Currently has 2×1GB)

The VIA EPIA 1000 is setup with a slimlined Gentoo install, booting over PXE(NFS root). It also had a shady memory stick, so got a new 1GB stick. For video out I have a Geforce FX5200(pci), using a DVI to HDMI cable to my LCD. The reason I choose to get a dedicated GPU card were XBMC, their port to Linux has come a long way since January. So far in fact I use it exclusively on Linux now, leaving me with yet another gadget collecting dust(Xbox)..
Bought a 3pack(OEM) of MS MCEUSB2 remotes that of course works a charm. The Myth integration in XBMC still has a little to go before its usable imo, so for now I switch between MythTV & XBMC with “Yellow” & “Green”.

In addition to this I have my old laptop setup as a FE in my old mans house, got a VGA2Scart adapter and that works OK. Not brilliant, since the WLAN adapter has been a little unstable at times. But will roll out a cat5e to their telly, so hopefully that will sort it.

And my Asus EEE I use frequently as a FE, its perfect for SDTV content.

EDIT 17/7

Yeah, I know.. dont even ask where, what & why, time just flies.

Another change is due in the land of MythTV, the BE will get another hardware change, since going fully Virtualized(OpenVZ) in my server setups I have a box to spare. Not a shabby box either, a C2D 3.2Ghz with 8GB ram, this will replace the AMD X2.
A tiny cons to this is that the mobo only has 2x PCI slots, so I will setup a Slave BE with the last DVB-S card & possibly a PVR-350 as a “weather cam”. This Slave might end up being a BE+FE combo for the office.

As a side note, this post will be posted as-is, any changes in the setup will be documented in the wiki.

Do I still love MythTV? Hell yeah!

*disclaimer* some of my friends, I wont mention names, have had a laugh at my so called technical gibberish. This post will be no exception *disclaimer*

Running several distributions can cause more than your average the-day-after hangover when you are due for a upgrade. Granted some are more a breeze than others, but they all got their quirks in some shape or form.

To my suprise this round the distro I was most worried about turned out to be the least of my worries.

To sum up the mix of distros running both dedicated and virtual atm I got; FreeBSD, Slackware, *ubuntu, CentOS & Gentoo. The ones I dreaded this round were CentOS(4.2->5) & Gentoo, the latter more so due to running old gcc, mysql and well, quiet a few other daemons & applications that are vital.

Although I love Gentoo it has lost terrain not to due to its capabilities & customizations, but rather well, what could be considered its biggest pros & cons. Since its a source based distro you got total control of what should be compiled, with which use flags & not to forget nailing the version of the given application at your discretion. But, and yeah, there is a but, the compile times even with Icecream chipping in can be a tool if you run several different archs. But looking aside from the day or so the boxes still running Gentoo had to use to get up to date it was really no problems. This is the first time in many years Gentoo has given me a “mainstream distro” feeling during such a big upgrade.

So all the coffee I had brewed, backups I had done, days of getting mentally ready for digging into odd errors were to no use? FreeBSD, Slackware & the various *ubuntu servers were all done, surely CentOS wouldnt be that bad?
Muhahaha, no, it wasnt, but it sure as hell beat all the previously mentioned distros by a milestone.
The fact that I run CentOS with OpenVZ did cause a few more hickups than a “vanilla” install would have, so I did get to consume most of the coffee I had prepared before I was done.

Ones you have the base systems updated/upgraded, and most of the vital daemons are up to date, then comes the fun stuff; All the other appliances/services running in the various boxes & VE’s..

This blog for instance, a Wordpress (aka WP) upgrade is no hassle, nor are most of the customizations Ive done to it. Only thing I wanted added feature wise was lightbox, had a decent hack with WPG2(v2) working earlier, but saw v3 had that on its feature list so decided to try it out. WPG2 is a integration plugin for WP to Gallery2, it has many features & uses, check out their wiki for more info.

To try & get back to topic of the post, the update cycle. With any update you got dependencies, and even more so when you add beta/rc appliancies to the pot. As I said, I wanted the lightbox feature in the blog, so brought home a SVN snapshot of WPG2v3, enabled and heh, lo’ and behold, more updates?

Sure, why not, WPG2v3 needed a newer WP, fair enough. Few minutes later, enabled WPG2v3 in latest WP(v2.2.2)… More updates? Yep, Gallery2 had to be updated, another 5 or so minutes Gallery2 v2.2.3 was in & WPG2v3 now works with lightbox.

So to sum it all up, *ubuntu, FreeBSD, Slackware & Gentoo, I still love you looong time, CentOS? Not so much, think its time to migrate OpenVZ to Gentoo or *ubuntu.

The rest of the daemons & appliances running have come a long way, most of them are a breeze to maintain & update. Be it bind, clamav, courier, dhcpd, exim, lighttpd, apache2, mysql, samba, snmpd, spamassassin and all its integrations & addons, it just works.

Summer is over, systems are all set for the winter… as always, if any of the services running under this or any of the other domains should have a hick-up, I’d appreciate a bug report.

So we all(?) have spilled something on our keyboard at some point, be it water, beer, coffee or god forbid some kinda non-diet soda. Anyway, I had the great “pleasure” of dismantling my laptop for the second(!!) time within 48hours this afternoon. The first time was no accident, rather a summer cleaning to get a bit more respons from a heavily hammered keyboard, in aftermath I see that was a huuuge mistake.

FFWD 48hours…..;

Was just about to do some maintance work as I took a big sip of the coffee mug, just as the mug left my lips I felt a caugh coming, and the ms between the initiation and the java fountain I managed to turn my head a few clicks east.
Sadly, not enough to avoid my laptop, tv, nor the wall thats ~2 meters away from the chair.
Shut down the laptop & flipped it over letting it drip off while I cleaned up the chair, floor, tv and wall surrounding the mishap.

The only good thing about my clean-up 48h ago was that I could quickly dismantle my laptop and get the clean-up started. The end result is 3 keys not responding, hopefully they will start to respond again in the morning, I’d hate to take the laptop apart a third time. The keys in question are B-N-M, the mass amount of WD-40, Fluxlene, compressed air & Q-tips did get 12 of 15 keys to respond again, so there is still hope for the remaining 3.

Anyway… the pictures of the entire curse & clean follows;

EDIT:
Ok so 3 keys just didnt wanna function in the end, contacted the supplier of the laptop and asked if they had a spare keyboard, which they had! So for the neat price of 100NOK + mva I can retire the external usb keyboard.

PS Data has yet again showed themselves as a quick & service minded company. 10/10 (again!)

… what can I tell ya, cats loving prog metal, gotta love it!

Read about this project last year, but mananged to miss the release of the 1.0 version(15th this month). Saw the demonstration video posted on kudos.no via Hr. Dalands blog.
It holds the cream of the crop of open source applications, and its a fork of the amazing Pluto project.
Read more about it on its web page.

This my friends will be huge, they are allready struggling to meet the demands on their download, having over 10K downloads of a 600M cd will have impact on most websites & its link.
So till they have fixed this(should be this saturday), have a look at their demonstration video posted on google;

All hail open-source projects!