I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

Apparently I've been recording through MythTV for 2 years as of today. Maybe a month or so on another machine beforehand, but 2 years of PVR goodness needs some stats to go with it.

Number of shows: 410
Number of episodes: 1625
First recording: Friday November 10th, 2006
Last recording: Monday November 10th, 2008
Total Running Time: 1 year 11 months 30 days 1 hr 51 mins
Total Recorded: 2 months 11 days 3 hrs 4 mins
Percent of time spent recording: 9%

Ever shutdown/rebooted the wrong machine through ssh+carelessness? molly-guard comes to the rescue, asking you to type the hostname of the machine you intend to shut down if it detects you are connected by ssh. It's packaged for and available in the main repositories Debian and Ubuntu, I don't know about any other distros.

An example:

[sudo] password for charles:
W: molly-guard: SSH session detected!
Please type in hostname of the machine to reboot: lucifer

At some point in the past, cable boxes were simple things that just changed channel, now they have a whole host of different states like on demand that can really confuse mythtv.

I've set up channel 109 (which is On Demand Preview on the Virgin box) to put the box into on-demand mode, giving mythtv a way of knowing the cable box is doing something other than displaying one of the conventional channels. It relies on users using channel 109 to switch to On-Demand mode, so isn't perfect, but it seems to work.

Overly hot hard disks are bad. I think we all know that. It doesn't stop us worrying about our data, but a problem can't be fixed unless we know it's a problem. Opening cases and touching hard drive to see if they are hot is the most low tech of approaches, but it's cheap and completely cross platform.

There are those that would have you believe making samba work is a black art. On the flipside of this are a number of GUI options for configuring samba that make it very very quick to shoot yourself in the foot. I'm going to try and run through a few key points that I end up explaining repeatedly, and try and record the snippets I keep having to look up because I'm not infallible.

NFS is somewhat handy when you need to share stuff between multiple unix-like machines. Unlike CIFS/SMB/Samba, NFS is suitable for applications where unix style file permissions and case-sensitive behaviour are required. It's quite commonly used for sharing home folders in a homogeneous network, and for providing system images for diskless clients.

Changing the hostname of anything that's been near mythtv is a pain in the ass. There's a howto using an offline copy of the data that I probably should have followed, but I didn't so after giving myself a world of problems, I'm going to try and work with the data online with phpMyAdmin. Seriously hardcore users could go with an interactive mysql session, but it's not amazing for browsing data quickly.

I have 3 nights worth of transcoding* stacked up and they've all failed due to looking for mythtranscode in the wrong place (/bin to be precise). Possibly a fault casued by using the old mythconverg database** on a new server. I go investigate...

Some swearing and configuring later:

My old media box was dying of cruft. After several years of repeated upgrades, repeated breakage, indecisiveness and having pretty much every package I liked the sound of installed, I decided to start with a clean install, using less awkward and less power-hungry hardware.