|
LokiProjectBuilding & Managing Your Digital World |
Bittorrent is an economical, fast, and popular method of distributing large files to many people. To download this software you’ll need a Bittorrent client, of which there are many free variants.
My favorite is the Azureus Bittorrent client for Windows. It is a Java application, so you may also need the Java Runtime found here. Click the ‘Download J2SE JRE’ option.
The mythfilldatabase tool downloads the latest programming information from ZapToIt. Version 0.17 had an automatic download function built into the GUI that worked well, and seems to be broken now. I bet there’s a permission problem somewhere. Let me know if you find something and I’ll update the instructions. In the mean time, I’ve updated the Sofware installation instructions to include updating the programming database using cron as recommended by http://www.wilsonet.com.
I think that’s the meat of the lokiproject platform configuration. This weekend I hope to post some instructions on how to backup the MythTV database, and manage videos.
Posted by brian on 11/10 at 05:50 AMUpdated the software page to include some remote control fixes. Tomorrow will include some mythfilldatabase fixes.
http://www.lokiproject.com/index.php/lokiproject/lokiproject/C8/
Posted by brian on 11/09 at 05:45 AMI’ve added some instructions on configuring your system after the core software suite’s installed. Expect more updates here shortly. I’ve also added some links and cleaned up some formatting. View the new instructions here: http://www.lokiproject.com/index.php/lokiproject/lokiproject/C8/
Posted by brian on 11/08 at 05:36 AMAn older article, I’m just now clearing out my list of articles to review. But it demonstrates the challenge that we face in building home DVR machines.
http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20051003/index.html
Posted by brian on 11/07 at 12:28 AMMythicTV. They’re using a knoppix distribution and attempting to define a reference hardware configuration. It’s close to what we’re attempting, but at a lower level.
This was submitted by my friend with the site: http://www.podcast.ch
Posted by brian on 10/25 at 05:33 AMThe LokiProject forums are up and running! You can find them at: Forums
Posted by brian on 10/25 at 05:12 AMUhg… The site looks terrible in IE.
I suspect that this won’t be a major concern with the members of the site, so I won’t put a lot of effort into supporting both browsers. If you do use IE, please download, install, and use Firefox. Thanks!
Posted by brian on 10/25 at 05:04 AMDo you know that IE parses:
<script>
</script>
Differently from:
<script/>
Stunning, and a total disaster. A 260 Billion dollar company can’t get that right…
Did I mention that you’re encouraged to use Firefox with this site.
The move to pMachine’s Expression Engine appears to be a success. I’ll be making many more updates over the next couple days and weeks now that I believe the web site is stable and productive. Let me know what you think at: brian (at) lokiproject.com.
Posted by brian on 10/24 at 05:31 AMI’m a life long technology enthusiast who’s now building a family and looking for a way to manage all the digital memories and media we’re accumulating, rapidly. I’ve got MiniDV video’s and a wife with a 5 Mega Pixel camera that doesn’t have a chance to cool down. I want to share my music with my kids and give them quick access to “The Wiggles” when they need it the most.
I appreciate the other DVR/PVR/Media PC solutions out there, but the objectives of those systems is the maintenance of a business model. The customer doesn’t enter the picture at all. Furthermore, when Hung Lo computing of Redmond WA goes bankrupt, how do I renew my DRM keys to my wedding video? Open solutions ensure my memories are preserved for future generations.
I live and work outside of beautiful Seattle, WA, not far from our primary competitor.
This site is a commercial venture and I do hope to make a modest profit, but I hope to do so while providing genuine value to my visitors. If I don’t provide value, let me know at brian@lokiproject.com and I’ll go do something else.
I do appreciate that I’m capitalizing off of other peoples very hard work, so if a profit’s generated, I’ll contribute a portion to those who helped make this project a success. That includes those fighting to guarantee our access to our own media like the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
Motherboard:Asus A7N8X-VM/400A great little motherboard, but I think it's being phased out. I'll have to look into a replacement soon. Load it up with 512MBs RAM. |
CPU:AMD Sempron 2200+We need a fast CPU, but not the state of the art. The Semprons do well in this role, and are priced right. |
Drives:Seagate 400The bigger the better. I'm partial to Seagate 400s. Any DVD drive will do, preferably a recordable one. |
Remote Control:OneForAll 6131This is a great little remote and not only does it support all the LokiProject features, it also controls my TV, Set Top Box, and Kenwood Receiver. |
Case:CoolerMaster ATC-620C-BX1Any Micro ATX will do. I really like the above, pictured below: 
|
platform/ks.cfg...from the CD to the root of the floppy disk.
linux ks=floppy...provided you have the correct hardware, that should install completely and automatically, without incident. Remove the CD and floppy, and reboot as requested.
username: rootClick the 'Red Hat' icon found in the lower left corner of the screen, then 'Run Command.' Enter:
password: changeme
xterm...and you'll see the xterm window appear. Insert the LokiProject CD you created above into the optical drive. Make sure the CD is mounted by typing:
mount /media/cdromNote: Your system's CD drive could be listed as /media/cdrecorder. If that's the case use /media/cdrecorder instead of /media/cdrom. This applies anywhere you see /media/cdrom.
cd /media/cdrom/scriptsType the command:
ls...to make sure you can see the files and directories located there, specifically: one.pl, two.pl, and three.pl. Enter the command:
perl one.pl -c ../config/standalone.xmlThis command upgrades the system with a known set of working software updates. At this script's completion, remove the CD and reboot the system. Log in again as root, insert and mount the LokiProject CD, start xterm, and change to the scripts directory, all as above. Now run the command:
perl two.pl -c ../config/standalone.xmlThis script configures virtually everything else including:
passwd mythtv...then enter:
changeme...twice. For some reason, the mythtv account's password isn't being set correctly.
username: mythtvRun xterm by double clicking its icon on the desktop. Type:
password: changeme
mythtvsetup...then:
mythfilldatabase...which will fill the database with all the programming information that DataDirect provides.
su...enter:
changeme...for the password. Insert the LokiProject CD, make sure its mounted, change to the scripts directory as above, then run:
perl three.pl -c ../config/standalone.xml...this last command sets the backend to run on boot and such things.
| 147 | Replay (Backwards curved arrow) |
| 178 | Skip (Arrow pointing right with vertical line) |
| 140 | Enter (1) |
| 113 | PIP |
| 145 | SWAP |
| 236 | Move |
| 240 | PVR Menu |
Hat->Control Center->Sound & Multimedia->Sound SystemUn-check the "Sound System" box.
Hat->System Settings->Date & Time Network Time Protocol tab Enable Time Protocol Add: pool.ntp.orgClick OK...
xfsdump-2.2.19-0_10.rhfc3.at.i386.rpmFrom xterm install the packages using the command:
xfsprogs-2.6.9-0_8.rhfc3.at.i386.rpm
rpm -i xfsprogs...now we have everything we need to build the file system. Hopefully, you've selected a hard drive that's larger than 8GB, the size of our root partition. If not, stop, buy and install at least a 250GB drive. From the xterm window, logged in as root, enter the command:
rpm -i xfsdump
fdisk /dev/hda...now, enter the following keystrokes:
| n | Creates a new partition. |
| p | Creates a primary partition. |
| 3 | Creates partition number 3. 1 & 2 are the root and swap partitions. |
| enter | Accepts the default beginning of the partition. |
| enter | Accepts the default ending of the partition, that is, the remainder of the disk. |
| t | Set the type of a partion. |
| 3 | Select partition 3 |
| 83 | Creates a new partition. |
| w | Writes the partition table and exits. |
mkfs.xfs /dev/hda3Now, it'd be nice if our new volume was available after a reboot. To do this, we need to enter a command into the fstab file. Edit it with the command:
nedit /etc/fstab...and enter the following line:
/dev/hda3 /mnt/data auto defaults 0 0
myth_load.sh...and copy it to:
/home/mythtv/.kde/Autostart...finally, go to the following directory with the command:
cd /home/mythtv/.kde/Autostart...and run the command:
chmod +x myth-load.sh...which configures the file to be executable.
lircrc...and over-write the file it at:
/home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc...with this file. Now the FFW (>>
and REW (<< buttons work by fast forwarding 30 seconds and rewinding 10. Furthermore, the skip button fast forwards 10 minutes and the replay button rewinds one minute.crontab.txtLog in as mythtv and run the xterm application. Execute the following command:
export EDITOR=nedit...which sets your default text editor. nedit is part of the lokiproject distribution. Then run the command:
crontab -e...and copy/paste the contents of crontab.txt into the nedit window. Save, exit and you're good to go. This configuration will update your TV programming database sometime after 11:00am. Why that time? I've been told that everyone updates their database sometime in the middle of the night. This should remove some of the load on the programming servers.
After releasing the software, my primary goal was getting the code in production at my home. Before I could do this, I had to get 600 gigs moved off my old hand built system so I could format the drives and start over. We'll, that took some work and you can read about it here:
This is not, technically, part of the LokiProject, but I thought people would like to hear about what I did to build an array for all my data...
A while ago I proved a theory that it was possible to simultaneously record and read NTSC video streams from a remote server over a 100MB network. Now the project's underway, I had an excuse to engineer that theory into a working solution.
Typically I run a very modest P3 500 with an enterprise Linux installation that supports a source control package I use. Its "enterprise" status gives me some comfort in it's stability and use as a software LVM platform. So I went down to Fry's and picked up a couple 400GB drives at ~$200 each and lashed them together into an 800GB Volume. This has worked very well with the exception that I only got about 720GB of storage out of it. More on that later.
I've never done this before so I took it slow, growing the volume and running frequent consistency checks. I started out by creating the LVM volume on a single drive. That's when I first noticed the loss of ~40GB, so I tried again by creating two 200GB partitions. That didn't help at all. So with a 400GB volume created I added the second drive and extended the volume to it. The process went uneventfully with the exception of these error reported by fsck.ext2 after the resize2fs command. Regretfully I didn't note the errors, but they occurred every time I expanded the volume and the errors seemed to indicate all the blocks were reporting incorrect free space size. It appears to work well after the errors were corrected though.
So the process I went through is this:
Install the two new 400GB drives, along side the existing 250GB drive with the OS on it.
Partition the first drive in half with fdisk, setting the partition types to 8e, the Linux LVM type.
Run pvcreate against each partition with the command:
pvcreate /dev/hdc1
pvcreate /dev/hdc2
...this adds some administrative data to each partition to support the LVM. Maybe that's were my 10% disk space loss went...
Create the Volume Group with the command:
vgcreate vg /dev/hdc1 /dev/dhc2
...this collects all the partitions into a single Volume Group with the name of 'vg'.
Now, we create the Logical Volume that'll appear as a single partition to our system. This was a bit tougher. I first ran:
vgdisplay vg
...to see how many PEs were available (see links below for an explanation of PEs) on the Volume Group. With that number, I ran the command:
lvcreate -l <FREE_PE_COUNT> vg /dev/vg/data
...which created the Logical Volume of the maximum size.
Now we'll put the file system on the volume. I did that with the command:
mkfs.ext3 -j /dev/vg/data
Finally we mount it to the file system. First create the mount point with the command:
mkdir /mnt/data
...then add the following line to the end of the /etc/fstab file:
/dev/vg/data /mnt/data ext3 defaults 0 0...and mount it with the command:
mount /mnt/dataYou should now be able to use the file system as usual. It's here that I copied about 300GBs of stuff to it from other machines. That took much of the night.
Now I wanted to extend the volume. I created a single, 400GB partition on the second drive with fdisk and assigned it's type to 8e as above, then created the Physical Volume with the command:
pvcreate /dev/hdd1
Then extend the Volume Group with:
vgextend vg /dev/hdd1
Then get the number of new extents with the command:p>
vgdisplay vg
...and extend the Logical Volume with the command:
lvextend -l <FREE_PE_COUNT> /dev/vg/data /dev/hdd4
Now comes the stressful part. Expanding the file system. First dismount the file system with the command:
umount /dev/data
For good luck, verify the volume's in good shape with the command:
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/vg/data
I guess you can do this with ext3's journal enabled so you have to turn it off with the command:
tune2fs /dev/vg/data -O ^has_journal
Now extend the file system with the command:
resize2fs /dev/vg/data
...that'll take a while... Now that the file system's been extended, check it again with the command:
fsck.ext2 -f /dev/vg/data
...this is where I had all the free space errors, just fix them and carry on. Add the journal back to the file system with the command:
tune2fs -j /dev/vg/data
Mount the file system again with:
mount /mnt/data
Now I have another 360GB of space that I tested with a series of reads and writes. It all looked good. After copying the rest of my data to the volume I had a measly hundred gigs left. So I ran through the same extension process above with the spare 200GB partition on the first drive containing the operating system.
So it's been a week since I set this up and we've been reading and writing a lot of data without incident. I have one more 400GB drive that I'm tempted to add, but I think I really should invest in a proper RAID5 system to protect my data
Learning Linux LVM, Part 1 on IBM's developerWorks
Posted by brian on 10/24 at 01:50 AM
