I have been using myth with three drives in an LVM array running XFS. I just found out about the disadvantage of LVM. One of my drives failed. This caused a total loss of the array. This really got me thinking about the problems caused by myth's requirement that all recordings are put in the same directory. I know the official solution to growing beyond one drive is to use LVM to make one giant virtual drive. But I haven't heard or thought much about the down side that every drive you add to that array reduces the reliability of the entire volume. I would much rather see a situation where a failing drive only takes its portion of the total storage with it.
But this is the developer list so I am not here to complain without proposing solutions. I have a few ideas. First, for the short term I have written a simple script that moves all recordings from the primary record directory to another drive (chosen at random from a list) and creates a symlink in the original location. For safty sake it waits until the file hasn't been modified for four hours to let scheduled jobs finish. There are more advanced ways to make sure myth is done writting the file but this will do for now. If anyone knows of any weakness with this concept please let me know. Once I test this a little more and give this opportunity for feedback I plan submit it for inclusion in the contrib directory. The better solution seems to be to make myth capable of handling multiple record directories. This would also allow us to simplify the installation by removing the reliance on LVM for large scale installs. We could either implement the same type of solution as my perl script or full handling of the multiple paths. If we add a field to the recorded table to store the destination path and modify all routines that read or write the files directly to use that complete path. I will submit my move script either in its current incarnation or as a script to be run as a user job to be run automaticly. Eric _______________________________________________ mythtv-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-dev
