User:Dlasher

user:dlasher myth page

about me

On a show I enjoy, called "The Unit", a character is asked why he lied about being a doctor, (while on an airplane ride). He replied "because if I tell people I'm a doctor, I get to hear about their problems the entire flight". When people ask what I do, family and friends know to answer "he works with computers." which saves me solving all the computer problems under the sun. When I was younger I would happily wade right in and fix anything for anybody. Now that I'm a bit older, I'm happy to feign ignorance to buy more treasured time with the people that I love.

However, since there should be a grain or two of truth in this "about me" I've been known/paid to be associated with some or all the following acronyms, in no particular order.. MPLS, OSPF, BGP, HSRP, VMWARE, LINUX, CENTOS, RAM, CPU, HD, VIDEO, EQ, C64, AMIGA, MP3, WINDOWS, VOIP, CISCO, and last but not least, MYTH.

about my mythTV

MythTV first came into my house as a Tivo Replacement project. We'd been using Tivo a LONG time, and the first HDTV transmitters were going up in the Phoenix AZ area. An HD-Tivo, at the time was $1000 plus another $300 for lifetime Tivo. I started snooping around, and said "I can do it cheaper!"

So on some spare hardware, and a motorolla HDTV tuner box, Svideo outs into a PVR-150, and I put up my first myth box, somewhere around 0.12. Fought with IVTV, SVN, and put a 14DB UHF antenna on my deck pointed at South Mountain (30+ miles away) and I had it up and running.

The first time I watched a recorded program, and the commercial flag notification came up on the screen, I hit the button, and it just... skipped.. no muss, no fuss... I said "ooooohhh!!"

So I hooked it up to the TV in the livingroom, and sat down to show my wife myth.. I handed her the remote.. the first time the ComFlag notify popped up, she said "What do I do?" I said "hit the blue button". She did, and she said "ooooooh!"

That was the beginning of a great relationship.. my family and myth. :)

Since then, it's been running on various hardware almost non-stop.. We had a few database crashes (old crusty hardware) and finally hard to start over in '04 with a new DB. Since then, here are the stats as of 10/2008;

First recording: Wednesday July 28th, 2004
Last recording: Monday October 6th, 2008
Total Running Time: 4 years 2 months 10 days 40 mins
Total Recorded: 1 year 5 months 23 days 18 hrs 2 mins

We grew from 1-box MBE/FE with a single 160g drive, to Software Raid, separate FE/BE, to Hardware raid (well worth the money!!) to several commflag boxes (at one point 7 machines in the mythfamily.. back down to where we are today, with 2 FE, 1 MBE, and 1 SBE with the tuners in it.. I just bought a couple HDHR's so I'm trying to slim down some more and get rid of the SBE. Our house (and anyone who comes over to watch movies, football, etc) loves MythTV.

Along the way we've helped other friends and family get their own Mythboxes up and running, so now I watch over about half-a-dozen other MythBoxen.

While we really don't need as much drive space as we have now at home, we were outgrowing what we had before.. and it's hard not to smile about having your own 5-terabyte array.. :)

Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              5.0T   2.4T   2.7T  47% /raid

MBE1 aka "backend1"

• CalPCSystems 8U rack mount case, 13 5.25" bays (yep! it's a monster)

• 750W enermax power supply

• Tyan S2882 dual-opteron motherboard

• 2 x Opteron 875 dual-core CPU's, 2.2ghz, cool & quiet enabled

• 12 gigs of PC3200 ECC REG RAM

• 3ware 9500S-12 raid card

• 3 x 4in3 hot-swap SATA drive bays

• 12 x 500GB Seagate 7200.11 SATA drives in Raid5 connected to 3ware

• 2 x 300GB maxtor drives, mirrored, 2x backup of "important data"

• 120gb boot drive

• Running Centos 5.2 64-bit

• Samba shares for drive mappings on house desktop PCs

SBE1 aka "tuners"

• midtower case

• 400W Antec power supply

• abit N7-2SG SocketA/462 motherboard

• AMD XP 2400

• 1.5gb PC3200

• 40gb boot drive

• (3) Air2PC cards, all 3 generations. BCM3500, NXT2002, LGT3300

• (1) ATI NXT2002 based card

• Running Centos 5.2 32-bit

FE1

• Antec Sonata case

• MSI AM2 NV6150 motherboard

• AMD x2 6400BE @ 3.4ghz

• corsair watercooling

• 2 x 1GB OCZ PC2-6400

• 20gb boot drive

• Running Fedora 9 64-bit (new hardware Centos didn't support)

FE2

• Whatever extra hardware I have

• Hooked to a 5.8ghz video/audio sender

• coupled with an ATI RF remote

• Beamed to the TV upstairs for when we have people over to watch football

• and the kids want to watch something upstairs...

contact info

sorry, I'm way too tired of spam and way too suspicious to leave any real contact info here.. I'll figure out a way to put a link here at some point that spam-harvesters can't get past..