On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 21:22 -0400, Ben Scott wrote: > On 4/3/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>> This was because he wanted to put the HDHomeRun on a separate LAN from > >>> the rest of his network > >> > >> ... because he had a wireless LAN for his main home network. (FYI.) > > > > Even if he had a different type of LAN, for the type of traffic that two > > tuners cranking out HD data, you probably would want to have it on a > > different LAN. > > Do we know that? By my calculations, even the worst-case figure for > high definition video is less than 30 megabits per second.
One stream or two streams? And if you are also trying to watch it from another box on the same network what are the stream(s) coming out? > If you've > got decent switched Ethernet, even at only 100 megabits/sec, that > should be very doable. If you've got gig Ethernet, that's about 3% > utilization. A drop in the bucket. His comment to me was that he had originally gotten some part of MythTV working at his house with the HomeRun on this regular network and the load being routed through his router (or it might have just been a hub at 100 Mbits/sec, not 1Gbit) was "jerky". Now that jerkiness could have been from all sorts of things, but he seemed to think it was network traffic. And since all it took to put that traffic on a separate LAN was one crossover cable and some configuration, he wanted to do that. > > Perhaps Jarod can comment on this? > > I just want to avoid complicating things if we don't actually have > any evidence that said complexity is needed. > > > His comment was that none of his routers he had could handle the load, > > so he put it on its own "LAN". > > I'm guessing he meant his wireless network. Most home users have a > box which was sold as a "wireless router". It includes router, > switch, wireless access point, and all sorts of other things. The > actual router component is just for NAT'ing the Internet uplink. > Within the LAN, you're not actually using the router part. > > Some of these boxes (notably the popular LinkSys WRT54G line) *do* > use software running on the CPU to implement the layer two network > bridge between the wired Ethernet switch and the wireless access > point. That would further slow things down. But you still have the > wireless problem. > > If he was actually *trying* to funnel the HDHomeRun through a router > (i.e., with multiple IP networks), he was almost certainly Doing > Something Wrong, so that's not very useful as a case study. :) He simply wanted to unload his network by creating a private "network" between the HomeRun and his system box. Whether his system box then uses wireless or a wired network to distribute the "front end" data, he wanted to keep the HomeRun raw data off his other network. > > >> Our instructions said we would walk people through the OS install. > > > > Yes, but we also encouraged them to install Fedora ahead of time to > > check out their hardware. > > Where did we do this? > > All I can find is "Ideally, test it with a general-purpose OS > (Linux, Windows, FreeDOS, etc.) to make sure it boots okay." > > Let's not blame people for not following instructions we didn't > actually provide. :-) > > I *do* think that encouraging them to install Fedora ahead of time > is a good idea. > > Of course, at some point, we've stopped being an InstallFest and > written a do-it-yourself HOWTO instead. We're going to have to strike > a balance. Hmmmm... Actually, if people could do this all by themselves, I would feel that we were "successful". I was talking to someone today that would like to have GNHLUG come down the BLU group and do a "MythTV Installfest". When I told him why we picked the school (the monitors, lab space, cable hook-ups, OTA) and that was why it was up in Concord, he did not seem to grasp the issue. Even if we were successful at creating a "step-by-step" that was good enough for people to do it all themselves, there is still that "personal touch" for people who feel more confident if there are people there to answer questions and guide them. >From my viewpoint installfests are more than just getting the code on the machine, they are a chance for people to get to know each other, the sponsoring group, and to act as an impetus for people to actually do something. I remember one of the people at this past one telling us that his wife told him that since he had bought the tuner card months ago he had better come to the Installfest to "do something with it". > > I also think we should revisit the idea of using one of the "canned > MythTV" distributions, like KnoppMyth or MythDora. If we can find one > that works reliably, it should save us a lot of time and effort: No > package selection questions, no huge pile of updates for software we > don't need, no third-party repositories to configure, no extra > packages to install, no system-level tuning to be done, etc. We tried MythDora at the first event. It failed. Jarod was going to work on it to make it better. It was still an option, but Jarod (and MythDora) were not there. > > It has been posited that, by going with a general-purpose distro, > we're making our lives easier, because that way we can do things in > stages. I've given that some thought, and my current conclusion is > that is a misconception. Well, until we have a working MythDora, we don't know. I have no tie into using the separate parts. I just want something that works, and if it does not work there should be a logical way of trying to fix it or get around the issue of why it is not working. If, on the other hand, we did suggest that they install the base system at home with a set number of packages, then do some commands to see if the boards were detected properly, that might also solve some problems ahead of time. Or we could make a decision that part of "MythTV" is helping them do this type of installation debugging also, which is a logical decision to make. It is just that it might be nice to find some of these problems before the InstallFest instead of during it, even if we did the fix during the InstallFest. At least one of the attendees did find a hardware issue before coming by trying to install Fedora at home. > We can still do things in stages. It isn't > like they found a way to build MythTV into the kernel. These distros > still boot the kernel, run some init scripts, and start X. They've > just got MythTV in the default package set, too. > > Now, if all the canned MythTV distros suck, then *that's* a good > reason to avoid them. :) I will not say that all of them are bad, but we also made another concession, that it be Fedora based since that was the one that Jarod was most familiar. If we wanted to use KnoppMyth, MythDora, MythUbuntu, MythSlackware or any other, a certain amount of the issues might be how each distribution sets up its networking and firewall rules. So in the end I think it just has to be choosing the distribution and really testing the install, which includes the designated hardware, designated distribution and designated instructions. And having "helpers" that both know that to type and an understanding of why they are typing things. Then when it works, it works. When it doesn't, its Murphy. > > -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-org mailing list gnhlug-org@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-org/
