htpc

Well, up until this point, everything has progressed exactly as planned.  As with all things that I do though, something must go wrong.  Well, now I have hit my first big speed bump with this build process.  Today I set my backend system to run the 0.24 install that I made a couple of days ago and that is still working fine.  After re-migrating the database, everything still shows up locally.  

The issue that I'm running into now is that when I launch the frontend application on my laptop I get an error message saying that MySQL couldn't connect to the database.  Eventually I get the initial setup screen asking for the language to use and then later what IP to use for the backend.  I set that up and then once again I cannot connect.

I poked around in the backend for a bit and noticed that there was a spot to set a PIN for the system.  The description said that a blank pin will reject all connections and a pin of 0000 will allow any system to connect to it.  Otherwise, the pin needs to match between backend and frontend(.  Just as a test, I set this to 0000 but I am still unable to connect to the backend.  When I setup the backend I made sure to open the firewall ports for Mythtv (6543 and 6544).  Not sure where to go from here.  Guess it's time for a bit of Googling.  Until I get it figured out, it's back to 0.21 for the backend.  Still no hickups for anyone other than me so WAF is still OK.

I think that the next most important system for me to get up and running is going to be the main frontend.  Again I've decided to load CentOS 6 onto a separate hard drive that I've got sitting around. Where did I get all of these extra drives, anyway?  Again, installation was fairly straight forward following the same Mythtv installation guide for Fedora.  This time through I skipped the steps related to configuring the backend since I will only be using this system as a frontend.  Since my backend is currently running MythTV 0.21 until I'm ready to do the final changeover I did not have a chance to do the final configurations that happen during the first time you run MythTV.  Specifically, I'm referring to designating the IP address or name of the backend.  By default the frontend will point to localhost (itself) as the backend to use.  So that is something that I will have to do later.

There were a couple of things that I did do though such as configuring automatic login (this is a dedicated MythTV system and I don't want to have to pull out a keyboard every time I want to watch TV) and automatically launching MythTV once logged in.  

That is about it for this system right now.  I've got it running a system update over night to pull in all of the latest packages and once that's done I may setup a VNC server on it so that I can do remote administration on it in the future as necessary.  First thing in the morning though, once the update is done, I'm going to put in the old hard drive so that the frontend can be used with the old backend while the rest of the systems get overhauled.  So far so good.  Two systems updated and nothing has been affected by it.  WAF still high.

Earlier this summer my MythTV server died.  After spending a bit of time getting the basics back up and running I've decided that it was time to also get things up to date again.  Thus far my plans have been limited to only software upgrades but I may do some hardware upgrading along the way as well.  With this in mind, I have decided to do a series of blogs detailing my plans for the upgrade as well as progress made and bumps that I've hit along the way.

This first entry will describe my current setup as well as my migration plan.  Some of this has already been accomplished but I want to get it all written down.  So here goes.