The Inner Circle

Well it’s been a weekend of discovery. Last week I decided that it was time I built a PC to drive our 40″ HDTV, so far I’ve just been running it from my desktop and the Xbox 360. I dislike using my PC for watching DVD’s, I like to reboot often and play with sound, etc. Even those the Xbox360 makes an excellent games console (IMO), it’s DVD play back features are crap. It doesn’t support up scaling from 480i to 720p. So it leaves it to the HDTV to up scale (which it isn’t very good at, read: you’ll see MPEG blocks).

So the solution was to build a media centre, I had three real options, Windows Media Centre (a lot of coworkers use it), MediaPortal (a long time friend of mine has used this with success) and of course MythTV. I had decided a while back to reduce the numbers of Windows machines in the house, there’s now only one and that’s part time, my desktop. So to MythTV it was, sadly there is no real support for MythTV on FreeBSD, so I was forced to use Linux (those who read know I’m a BSDite at heart).

First was to buy a new PC to do MythTV, I decided to get an Intel machine, so I’ve ended up with a Pentium D 2.8Ghz machine with 1Gb of RAM. I pulled out my old Nebula Electronics DigitTV card that I got for a birthday a long time ago.

Debian Etch installed with it’s usual speed and grace, I used a base system install so I could add everything as I needed it. I had issues getting the nVidia driver working the “Debian Way”, so was forced to install it using the driver installer. Debian detected everything on boot, which was a pleasant surprise.

However, I had an issue, the DigiTV card wasn’t recognised as a DVB device. It turns out that when I tried to load dvb-bt8xx it would complain:

dvb_bt8xx: unable to determine DMA core of card 0,
dvb_bt8xx: if you have the ALSA bt87x audio driver installed, try removing it.
dvb-bt8xx: probe of dvb0 failed with error -14

Everything I read suggested that snd_bt87x was the cause of the problem, but it wasn’t loaded. I scratched my head for many hours. Until I found the foot note on a German message board, it suggested (through a badly translated version) that btaudio.ko was responsible.

Sure enough, as soon as I unloaded btaudio.ko and reloaded all the bttv stuff, it worked and /dev/dvb/ appeared. In order to stop it loading, I could either delete it, or create a file in /etc/modutils/ called nobtaudio and put the following line in it.

options btaudio enable=0

On Debian you then need to run “update-modules”, reboot to be sure. I’m sure the same can be put in any modprobe.conf type system. Then in order to force the load of the dvb drivers in /etc/modules:

nxt6000
bt878
dvb-bt8xx
This brought a machine up that had a working DVB card. Installing MythTV was far to easy ;). Following the following guides:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_MythTV_on_Debian_Etch
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_Mythtv

The HOWTO doesn’t mention but you need xmltv-utils for the EPG side of things. Also doing apt-cache search mythtv shows a lot of extra packages you might want, like mythdvd, mythtv-themes, mythnews, mythweather, etc.

The EPG is a bit of a hastle to get to work, there is a guide that helps, it’s important to read it, especially that you have to match things up in the database.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Uk_xmltv

There are a few issues still to sort out, I have odd lipsync issues on BBC channels, and occasional stutters, it just needs playing with reallly. I’m sure there’s a voyage of descovery to go. I’ll post more as I figure stuff out that’s worth knowing.

D.

Ahum, this weekend I was bad, I was very bad, naughty… and it’s all Richards fault at work. I now have an Xbox 360. It’s oh so shiney, I got the full system, with an extra wireless controller, an extra wired controller and most importantly a HD VGA cable.

I first ran the box via composite through my nebula TV card, it was fuzzy, playable, but fuzzy. But now with the HD VGA cable, it’s at 1280×1024 (yes you can set the res), oh my god, it’s a fine picture.

Had a small issue with voice chat from a wireless controller, it sounded like there was feedback and curruption. Once I plugged a cable in (with the Play & Charge) it went away… how odd. I need to play with that.

Burnout Revenge for the Xbox 360 is sweet. I need more games through. Whoooo. It’s also on the network, it’s firewall must be strict or adaptive, as it can’t even pinged. Very impressed even if it’s a Microsoft product, although saying that, their mice and joysticks have always been very good.

More games needed!

D.

‘t has been a while since I last blogged, not a huge amount going on really, just getting on with life.

I’ve decided to pickup Horizon again, I’ve pretty much decided on functional PHP and MySQL again. While I’d like to try J2EE/Struts for it, I also want to be able to use it in the majority of places, like my parents home machine and my “router” neon.

I’ve been playing around with lighttpd a fair amount after Andy proded me to a few weeks back, I have to say I’m very impressed with it. I’m not a big fan of FastCGI spawning three copies of PHP without any users, but I suppose it could be worse. I’m tempted to set it up on nebula for ajb007.co.uk and provide a second alias to try it through.

nebula is approaching a point where is despiratly needs a reinstall, however I’m waiting until FreeBSD 6.2 which should hopefully have Xen dom0 support. Then it’s a trip down to telehouse for a quick Xen install, and create a cell which has the current nebula in it, then to create the proper installation from afar. Xen will provide me the ability to reinstall entire cells with very little down time.

xenon has also been having a few issues since it’s MB swap, the Adaptec 2810SA RAID card was being lost contact with during heavy use, disabling SMP seems to have restored the stablitiy, which probably means there’s a race condition somewhere that needs to be found.

I’ve been having issues trying to make neon pass Bonjour traffic between xenon’s vlan and the inner lan vlan. The problem is Bonjours address is in 224.0.0.0/24 which isn’t ment to be routed between subnets… “great”. However I want to use daapd for sharing to iTunes. I’m thinking I’ll need to write a relay program that does simple listening and relaying, and of course IGMP… :/ This is also an issue to stream music to the Airport Express from iTunes, although not an issue using DVD Jon’s streaming program.

Work is good, had a few issues with ResNet over the past few weeks, Cisco’s VMPS protocol is a PIA. We were having an issue where the VMPS server appeared to be loosing data, so after a long rewrite the problem still persisted, the end issue was that the VMPS and *nix kernel was buffering that much for us that the requests became out of date.

It appears that it sends 3-5 requests for the same MAC auth to ensure that one gets through, and thoose request are only valid for 10 seconds, before it does it again with a different ID. Our issue was that this was all to much for the PostgreSQL database to deal with in a timely fashion.

There are three things I can do to VMPSd to solve this, we can check upon reciept of VMPSd packet to see if we already have that ID, upon popping from the queue if the request is over 10 seconds old and upon processing, if it’s just a reconfirmation just bounce back the VLAN provided. This will put off the problem for a while, but there isn’t a huge amount that can be done in the long run, this method is maintainable for 6,000 ResNet users, but I’m not sure how well it will scale campus wide. Saying that, I’m not convinced of the database design the external script is using.

Ahhh well, I shall get on that this week if I have time and make it cleaner again.

Feck all else to talk about really,

D.

Well, it’s been a tiring week and weekend, I’m really starting to feel the need to relax alot more then I do. The holiday from work doesn’t seem to have really helped as much as it should. Maybe I should really try chilling at the weekend and not doing anything.

Anyway, the new RAID array is now in and working. I really have to remember that manufacturer sizes are in billions of bytes, not gigabytes. The RAID array is 1.5Tb in size, with 1.4Tb usable (thanks for that FreeBSD ;)). I copied the old data onto it last night and it’s now at 1.1Tb capacity. Tonights task is to rebuild my PC into a slow POS. :/ Maybe I’ll get away with playing SWAT, I guess I really need a new PC, I did spec one up last weekend, it came to the best part of £800. Sigh.

I’ve ordered a new gigabit switch from Dell (strange I know), it appears to be web managed and supports vlans and port aggregation. I’m thinking it might do the job. My current gigabit switch doesn’t support vlans at all, and goes flunky when you try and use it for that. It was uber cheap from Dell.

If you arn’t already a fan, I’d like to recommend Questionable Content as a great web comic, it’s about the only webcomic I’ve got into, and I’m not sure why. ’tis pretty neat and worth a read. You might need to go back to the beginning though.

Anyway enough of that for now.

D.