Digital Planning
Jan. 10th, 2009 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupYesterday Linda and I went out and spent my Birthday money, our Christmas money from my folks, and a little bit more, and bought the final bits I need to build a MythTV box (at least I think I'll run MythTV. There seem to be 3 or 4 Personal Video Recorder suites now available on Debian, and I'll need to evaluate them.)
Part of the impetus for finally doing this is that I needed a drive capable of storing a few image copies of a 500GB drive so that I can attempt to do a recovery of my deleted music files. Since I'm new to using the various forensic analysis and undelete tools on Linux, I want to dd a full copy of the drive before I start, and would even prefer to work on a second dd-ed image. So, I am now the proud owner of my first 1TB disk. Woo!
Anyway, the plan is to use the 1TB disk as a scratch work area while recovering my files and once I've done that (or am satisfied that I've recovered as much as I can), then the 1TB drive will be reformatted and put into a spare computer case which I will turn into a MythTV box. I also plan to turn the box into a storage and download server. How all that will work together is not yet clear as I don't have any real experience with the different PVR suites, but I hope to work that all out soon.
I'm also wondering if I'll really need a 500GB drive on my main system, once I'm done. Right now most of that space is being used to store files that would be better off in the storage server / TV player. One possible scenario I can imagine is to put my current 500GB system drive and my 500GB backup drive into the storage server and merge them with Raid or LVM. I could then use the 1TB drive as a back-up drive. That would mean going back to a 200GB drive for my main system, but thats currently more than I have allocated to the non-storage partitions as is.
Anyway, once all that is taken care of then I think it will FINALLY be time to replace my aging 486-DX box which is serving as my firewall and router with one of the other machines I have. I'm thinking that an old dual-pentium system that I have laying about might do the job. Right now the 486 has trouble coping when too many downloads are happening and/or I have to copy large files to or from the web/mail server in the DMZ.
After that I think the next order of business might be to start upgrading the network to 1Gig ether. Some of the machines in the house already support it, but none of the routers do, so its not been usable. Its not a priority for now though. Just having a dedicated TV box will be great. I don't REALLY need the ability to stream multiple channels of video anywhere in the house -- at least not for now.
Part of the impetus for finally doing this is that I needed a drive capable of storing a few image copies of a 500GB drive so that I can attempt to do a recovery of my deleted music files. Since I'm new to using the various forensic analysis and undelete tools on Linux, I want to dd a full copy of the drive before I start, and would even prefer to work on a second dd-ed image. So, I am now the proud owner of my first 1TB disk. Woo!
Anyway, the plan is to use the 1TB disk as a scratch work area while recovering my files and once I've done that (or am satisfied that I've recovered as much as I can), then the 1TB drive will be reformatted and put into a spare computer case which I will turn into a MythTV box. I also plan to turn the box into a storage and download server. How all that will work together is not yet clear as I don't have any real experience with the different PVR suites, but I hope to work that all out soon.
I'm also wondering if I'll really need a 500GB drive on my main system, once I'm done. Right now most of that space is being used to store files that would be better off in the storage server / TV player. One possible scenario I can imagine is to put my current 500GB system drive and my 500GB backup drive into the storage server and merge them with Raid or LVM. I could then use the 1TB drive as a back-up drive. That would mean going back to a 200GB drive for my main system, but thats currently more than I have allocated to the non-storage partitions as is.
Anyway, once all that is taken care of then I think it will FINALLY be time to replace my aging 486-DX box which is serving as my firewall and router with one of the other machines I have. I'm thinking that an old dual-pentium system that I have laying about might do the job. Right now the 486 has trouble coping when too many downloads are happening and/or I have to copy large files to or from the web/mail server in the DMZ.
After that I think the next order of business might be to start upgrading the network to 1Gig ether. Some of the machines in the house already support it, but none of the routers do, so its not been usable. Its not a priority for now though. Just having a dedicated TV box will be great. I don't REALLY need the ability to stream multiple channels of video anywhere in the house -- at least not for now.
