[mythtvnz] Upgrade/Reinstall tips

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 24 Sep 2013 10:56:11 +1200, you wrote:

>Rob Connolly wrote, On 09/24/2013 09:56 AM:
>> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 09:51:54PM +1200, criggie wrote:
>>> PFFT  two years?   Mine was installed in 2005 and the only two
>>> annoying things are the architecture is i386 and the disks are
>>> getting old.  sda is at 86159 power on hours.
>>> Actually now I think about it, none of the hardware other than one
>>> tuner card is in common with the original backend box.
>>>
>> I'm going to assume thats an Arch system also. If so I'm impressed. I
>> just didn't keep up well with all the updates, so when I did try to
>> update the large number of changes always killed something. Also, pacman
>> does not support partial updates, so even adding a package became
>> difficult after a while.
>>
>> That said, the current setup is pretty damn stable if you just leave it
>> alone (but I don't want to do that, since it's absolutely NOT an
>> appliance!).
>>
>
>
>Nope - plain pure vanilla Debian, with the -multimedia packages for myth.
>
>The other server started with Debian potato in 2001, so that's been 12 
>years of no reinstalls.
>The only downside is neither is running 64 bit, but that's no big deal.

I found there was one unexpected big advantage of my move to a new
motherboard when my old one became unreliable.  RAM was cheap, so I
gave it 8 Gibytes, and now that in combination with a much faster
processor has mythcommflag running in real time - it does all its
processing from the buffers in memory before the data for the
recording is written to disk.  That halves the disk traffic while
recording (and therefore probably doubles the number of recordings one
disk can handle at once).  A 32-bit system is unlikely to be able to
do that due to constrained use of RAM.

My original MythTV install in 2007 by the suppliers of the box was
32-bit, and when I added a second PVR-500 dual tuner card, I ran into
a problem where it would not work and I had to use a very arcane
kernel boot option to readjust the mapping of the memory for the I/O
to get it enough address space.  So when I did my own first install of
MythTV when DVB-T arrived, I moved to 64 bits and have never had any
more problems like that despite all the tuners now in the box.

So there are some big deals with using 32 bits, but you have just not
met them yet.