Since I moved to the 0.21-fixes branch of mythtv and also updated all of the boxes to ubuntu 8.04 I have not done much to anything. They have been running great and there has been no need to really make any changes. About a month ago I noticed one of the backend drives that stored most of the shows stated to show signs of problems. I moved everything off of it and used it as the local ubuntu mirror as that gets updated nightly and is not mission critical as far as I am concerned. Well this past week I kind of got lucky. I have been wanting to replace the case of the masterbackend server. I ordere up a new antec case and at the same time I ordered another seagate 500 gig sata drive to replace the samsung drive that is going bad. The parts came in the other day and I imediately made the swap. Only took about 2 hours to move the data and I was back up and everything was great once again. Smartd was happy again and I was glad to see no more emails with error messages at reboots. I hope to start putting things in the new case in the next few weeks but I am glad I now have about 1.4 terabytes of storage available to myth if needed. I have setup myth to record anything in HD as far as the olympics go. That should eat up some space really quick.
So I thought I would work on the myth boxes a bit more the past few days also. Finally got around to downloading the latest svn of 0.21-fixes, there has been quite a few bug fixes since I built last. Looks like everything is working great so far. In the coming weeks I want to totally rebuild the master backend. I want to put the current motherboard and drives in the new case and put the new processor (an amd x2 5000 instead of the amd x2 4200 that is currently in that box) in the masterbackend instead of my test box. At the same time I want to totally rebuild the os if time permits. I want to start running ubuntu 8.04 amd64 instead of the current ubuntu 8.04 i386. the box has 4 gigs of memory in it but the os only sees about 3.2 gig. Other than that I hope to leave things alone. Later I probably will rebuild the frontend boxes to be amd64 also.
I just want to get most of the changes made before the fall season kicks in and the box really starts to get utilized again. It has been a long time since all 6 tuners have been in use. I just tested all 6 to make sure they were all working fine after the the update to latest -fixes and they did great. The box should get a pretty good workout in the next few months I would think.
Assuming you are going to do a fresh install on that box, make sure you download the current version of hardy. Right now, it is 8.04.1 (includes a lot of the earlier updates, including I believe the security keys fix).
But if I use the old 8.04 and just do the update thing it will be the same result correct? I already have the cd for 8.04, I could just do the netboot also.