Disks from OpenFiler

My intention has been to get to the disks with a raw Ubuntu build and connect to the NAS drives via USB.  XFS, as far as I have found, is only mountable by Linux (again, "as far as a I have found")..  The upside to your post is that if my NAS was also LVM expanded it would mean the Raid was really just a "drive stack" which hopefully means they both have good data still.

The problem with what you are wanting to do is that I am not sure if TKL will mount a USB addressed drive.  I know that VMWare won't.  You would need to do a local install of TKL FileServer or TKL DomainController to find out.  No harm, that I can see, in trying.

On my side I want to get to the Data then move it so it is an issue of "getting to it" then moving it.  Fundamentally I think this is what you want to do also, but you should have the advantage of having access now.  That said, take the advantage and move it if you have enough space now to do so.  Once done you have a few Drives you can use as you wish (or sell as a NAS on Craigslist).

my 2 cents anyway.

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but then I get to the end of your post and it is Solved!  Good work.

How did you attach them to your system (USB or SATA direct)?  What TKL build did you attach the drives to?  Would seem a great solution.  This NAS issue has been more than a frustration on my side (the drives are sitting in a ziplock beside me infact) but I will cross my fingers about a solution here.

I'm interested in learning how to use a linux Tv Server to record TV shows.  Can you give a bit more info or direct me to some links for info.

Glad to hear it is working well for you.  That is what TKL is all about!!!

-Todd

Cheers, i'm pretty happy.  Now, along with help from this post:

/forum/general/20110218/fileserver-and-tv-server

My fileserver is in the same box as my tv server.  Which is good - less power, less noise, more room.

Mine was the latest version of TKL file server, on a bare metal install.

I attached them direct - my tv series VG are all sata, my music backup is one sata and one ide disk, and my movies VG is dead at the moment, but it is 2 ide drives. 

initially it was frustrating because the web interface showed the volume group along with the system one, so i kept wondering why i couldn't do anything with it. Good work to the blokes who wrote the lvm doco that i found.

I started this openfiler thing ages ago when I had very little knowledge of linux or filesystems, but needed an open source storage solution that I could expand myself.  Looking back it was so hard, not user friendly at all.

Seriously, I burned the iso image for TKL yesterday.  I spent a great deal of time today getting TKL off the ground - but that was due to me trying to assemble a server out of multiple bits of gears and coming into problems with dead ram, dead drives or dead mother boards.  The whole TKL install experience from go to whoah probably took me 6 hours.  That time includes building a machine, installing TKL,  taking a volume group out of the openfiler box, testing that the TKL box could see the XFS VG, working out how to activate the VG and then get the shares across the network, putting the openfiler box back together so my wife could watch some recorded tv, reinstalling TKL into the final production box along with an extra network card and a DVB-T card, pulling my old tv series VG out of the openfiler box, installing the TV series VG and getting it mounted and fstab'd, installing HTS TVheadend, setting up all my tv channels, and setting all the shares up so they're all visible and editable on my network.

By contrast, the openfiler experience took me days upon days upon days.  That was after I built the system.  Once.  I didn't have a streaming tv server then, or a dog that tore my washing off the line.  The interface is buggy, really lacking in features and explanation too.  Worse, the forums arent helpful, and are full of people trying to get support for their small enterprise class systems.

Hats off to the TKL crew.  the file server appliance from what I have seen so far is simple enough to keep the average home networked guy happy, and has enough in it to make the geek in you configure and customise til your hearts content.

Looking forward to what this fileserver can do!

Smoe

Hi Todd,

I use a HTS Tvheadend backend

http://www.lonelycoder.com/hts/tvheadend_overview.html

and XBMC as the frontend:

http://xbmc.org/

I know that the XBMC team were coding PVR support straight into XBMC, but for now as far as I know the best way to get tv around the network is the server backend/frontend way.

It certainly works that way in my house.  It's much easier to have one server that hosts all of my media including DVB-T cards, than to have a computer with an antenna connection in each room.  The network cable is already there - why not use it?

I've got 2 PC's and two old XBOX's that stream stuff from the fileserver/tvserver box.

TvHeadend uses it's own protocol - htsp - to stream the tv.  you just add a source to the video section ie htsp://user:pass@i_address:9982, and then presto! you have tv configured on your xbmc client.  My setup is to have a list of standard channels, a list of HD channels, each multiplex, and a lit for all.  These tags can be changed though, so you can include or exclude any of the channels that you want.

I did have problems with an old Hauppauge WinTV1110 card.  If you can avoid it, do it.

Tv Headend treats dual tuners as two separate tuners.

with one tv tuner card, anyone on the network can watch the same channel, or different channels as long as they are on the same multiplex.  ie one room is watching ABC1, and another is watching ABC2.  If someone wants to watch ABC1, and another wants to watch SouthernCross10, then you need 2 tuners. 

My intention is to have a tuner card for each client - or a dual card for every 2 clients.

Tvheadend does have recording - thoughI don;t use it.  I've heard it's good.  You can tell it to record locally or to a remote location.  There is also an iphone app so you can record stuff if you're not at home.  You can of course do remote management if you like as well.  It has all the other bells and whistles - EPG, access contorl etc.

You configure tvheadend via a web interface on port 9981, much like you configure TKL fileserver appliance.

Hope that helps, or answers at least some of your questions! Let me know if you want more info, or if you decide to do it and need / want advice.

Thanks, I'm going to look into it.

-Todd

This sounds too cool. Definately have to have a play with this one! :)

Although I'd like to run it as a VM as my server runs ProxmoxVE and rather than setup a separate PC., I'd rather just add to that. I'll have to see though, the TV tuner card I have I haven't tried yet on Linux (got given it by a friend who had only ever used it in WinXP). Also not sure how you go passing PCI hardware through Proxmox to the VM. USB passthrough is pretty substandard and flakey so hopefully PCI passthrough will work better. We'll see...

Hi Jeremy,

had a chance to play with the tv tuner stuff yet?  my one is swimming along awesome after the help you gave me - cheers!

Too much going on in the 'real world' and when I do get a chance to play with computers I've got a stack of friend's stuff to fix... The TV reception where i live is pretty crap too, so I anticiapte it will be a pain. Think I'll get a decent antenna on the roof before i worry too much, so could be a while.

Glad to hear yours is going well. :)