[mythtv-users] MythTV Secondary FE/BE Setup Advice

[James Crow]

After having Myth running for the better part of two years on one TV I
have purchased a second Myth box for the other TV in the house. I am
debating making it a secondary BE/FE or just using it as a FE. My
current BE/FE machine can only hold two drives (2x 500GB SATA). One
drive is for recordings and one drive is OS and other media files (DVD
rips, flac audio, etc). 

The new system came with a 500GB SATA drive. Plenty of room for OS
install, but how do I best utilize the space? I don't watch much TV so I
don't need it for TV recording space. I would like to use the space for
storing DVD rips and flac audio. So far I have not found the right
documentation to tell me how/if space local to a secondary backend can
be used within Myth. In the documentation it mentions setting the
storage directories per BE, but I think that only applies to TV
recording space. I tried to run the video manager on the slave BE and it
wanted to remove the video files stored on the master BE.

Ideally I would prefer to keep all recording duties on the master BE so
that the slave BE can be powered off except as needed for watching
TV/movies. Is there a way to have more media files available to a slave
BE without causing problems for the master BE?

BTW these are both Mythbuntu 8.04.1 systems if it matters.

Thanks,
James