A small update

Well, I’m sad to say that I had to temporarily disable my server power savings.  There were a couple of key problems that I ran into while using the shutdown and wakeup scripts.  The first was that there were a few times where I would be watching a show on my frontend (which is a separate machine from the backend) and it would run for an hour or two but then the backend would "forget" that there was a system connected to it and it would shut itself off.  The show would just freeze wherever it happened to be.  After turning the backend back on again it would pick right back up as though nothing had happened.

The other thing that I ran into was that after a certain number of power ups the system would force a filesystem check on the hard drives which would take upto an hour to complete.  This wasn’t a concern for me before because I never had to reboot my server.  Mythtv is very reliable and I really only needed to shut it down to upgrade hardware or to physically relocate the server.  The result for me was that I missed a couple of recordings because the system expected to be up and running in 5 minutes or less.

I think that both of these issues have probably been resolved with updates to Mythtv.  The current release is 0.23 (soon to be 0.24 – yay) and my production server is running 0.21.  Once I determine what Linux distribution I end up liking on my development system I plan to update the production server to something current.

Speaking of which, on my development system I have so far tried out Debian, CentOS and now Mythdora.  In all of these setups I have been able to use packages to get Mythtv up and running quickly and easily.  The issue that I’ve been struggling with in each of these systems is getting the same system to also run Zoneminder as well with the long term goal of being able to use the MythZoneMinder plugin.  There has been some level of fail that I’ve run into on each of these setups.  That is not to say that I couldn’t have gotten everything working on each of these setups, I just wanted something that would work out of the box.  And if you are not interested in Zoneminder, each of these setups ran Mythtv alone very well.  Especially in the case of MythDora, getting Mythtv up and running was a breeze.

I’ve got ArchLinux and Gentoo distros downloaded and burned onto CD to try out soon.  I’m sure I’ll be back soon with an update for both of you that are still interested.  🙂

Until then….