[mythtv-users] Backend with really crappy hardware

[Travis Kelley]

You are correct about the hard drive issues...but that can pretty easily
be overcome by using a smaller hard drive to boot from.  I have an old
celeron 300a->450 system as my backend.  It didn't detect my 120 gb hard
drive so I installed a 400mb drive as the boot partition (possibly the
largest boot partition ever) and then linux has no trouble seeing the
larger hard drive after the kernel loads.  Then I just spin down the
small drives in my startup scripts so its not sitting there wasting
power all day.  Ah the joys of linux on old hardware.

On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 08:18, Maarten wrote:
> On Friday 22 October 2004 12:17, Kalle Pokki wrote:
> > I just realised I have an old 66 MHz 486 machine with 64 MB memory in my
> > storage room. Has anyone successfully run the backend with such a slow
> > machine? I don't intend to run an X server or really anything else than
> > what is absolutely necessary with that box. I do have two DVB tuners but
> > just writing the data streams to disk shouldn't take too much cpu.
> >
> > What do you think, does mythbackend and mysql require more than 64 MB
> > memory or would that just result in excessive swapping?
> 
> It's not even the memory, I reckon.  The PCI bus on that early a machine had 
> so much troubles / design flaws that you will have difficulty getting 
> something simple as a 100Mbit NIC working.  This obviously means that more 
> exotic demanding hardware will not work.
> 
> And besides, I had a single bttv card system, and the 256 MB therein was 
> almost fully used up. Thus, running with one quarter that amount will swap 
> like hell.  And on another note, you may not realize it, but what would be 
> the biggest harddisk such a 486 will accomodate ?  540MB ? 8GB ? 32GB ?
> You can almost certainly be sure it's game over beyond 8GB, or even lower.
> 
> Build a smallish firewall out of it, but none other than that...
> 
> Maarten 
> 
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