I’ve decided to drop cable / satellite, and create a DVR that will record programming from over the air. This first entry is just going to outline the what I wanted out of the DVR and what equipment I purchased and why. The main intention is for a DVR, and not a gaming system. In the chance that I did decide I want to go that route, I tried to purchase equipment so that I would only need to purchase a video card to allow it to play games.

Requirements

• Quiet. Should not be audible when watching tv
• Stream online content
• DVR over the air content
• Stream shows and movies from home file server (NFS or Samba)
• Should be able to play multiple containers and formats (xvid, divx, mkv, H.264)
• No keyboard and mouse should be required for use

Hardware Purchase

• Case: nMEDIAPC HTPC 1000B
• Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 430B 430W
• Motherboard: ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO
• Processor: AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz
• Memory: CORSAIR XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 (PC3 10666)
• Hard Drive: Seagate SV35.5 ST31000525SV 1TB
• Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Media Center Kit

Note: I also purchased the LCD that goes along with the case, but after having used it, I would not have purchased it. It is too difficult to read at a distance and it is poorly made. I thought it would be cool to have showing time and what was playing and recording, but I have to get up close to the tv to see it.

nMEDIAPC HTPC 1000B
I was looking for a good case that would fit my media center stand. This case had the identical shape of my current audio receiver and even matched it’s dimensions perfectly. There is a front panel on the front that hides one IEEE 1394 port, one e-SATA port, two HD Audio ports, one SDHC 2.0 Card Reader and three USB 2.0 ports. It does not come with a power supply. You can buy an optional lcd for the front, but as I mentioned before, I would skip on purchasing it. A Micro ATX will fit in it. It has 1 5.25″ Drive Bays and 4 3.5″ Drive Bays, but you will only probably be able to use 2 out of the 4 3.5″ Drive Bays due to things getting to tight and reducing air flow. It has 2 60mm Fans in the back and 1 90mm Fan on the side which are very quiet. I’m very pleased with this case and would highly recommend to others.

SeaSonic S12II 430B 430W
This power supply is enough power for what I need. It’s also very quiet and has excellent reviews. Unfortunately, it is not modular, but I had no problem bundling up the extra cables and putting them in one of the empty 3.5″ drive bays.

ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO
This seems to be a good motherboard. The reasons that I purchased this one in particular is that it is a Micro ATX form, allows for DDR3 memory, has both a PCI Express 2.0 x16 and PCI Express x1 slots, has a integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 GPU with 128MB DDR3 1333 memory, has a HDMI output, and a S/PDIF Out optical out.

The reason that I wanted both a PCI Express 2.0 x16 and a PCI Express x1 slot is for the tuner card and a future video card upgrade if I choose to upgrade it to a gaming system. The HDMI out is self explanatory and I really wanted a S/PDIF optical out so that I could hook it up to my receiver.

I wanted a motherboard with the integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 so that I could offload the video decoding of the H.264 to the video card from the CPU. With this video card, I can watch every mkv that I have with no stuttering and very little cpu usage. I also don’t have to worry about the additional heat and fan sound from having a video card in the machine, and also the price of having to buy a video card.

The only downside to this motherboard is the bios settings. It’s hard to get it just right to get in there and the bios menu leaves a lot of wanting. It does horrible for setting boot sequence since if you want to boot from usb, a bootable usb needs to be in there to set it to boot from it in the order and it only works for that particular device. Luckily, you only need to mess around with the menu once.

AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz
I bought this cpu for two reason: 1) 65 watt tdp and 2) price per performance.

I could have bought a much nicer processor that runs cooler and faster, but then it would have increased the cost of the dvr quiet a lot. This is a dual core processor, for when I’m running multiple things at once, which every computer is doing anymore. It handles everything wonderfully and without stutter. It’s also powerful enough for doing the tv re-encoding and if I want to use it for playing video games in the future. The 65 watt tdp means that it uses less power and runs cooler. The fan that comes with it is very quiet also.

CORSAIR XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 (PC3 10666)
Since DDR3 is dropping in price and is getting close to the cost of DDR2, I decided to go the faster route and get DDR3. There is no special reason I bought the CORSAIR, it was just on a very good sale when I found it. I decided to go with 4 gigs, because I planned on having multiple programs running at the same time and heard that if I wanted to run Boxee, that it was a memory hog.

Seagate SV35.5 ST31000525SV 1TB
I figured a one tb drive would be more than enough to use as a dvr, since I wouldn’t be storing anymore besides recorded tv shows on it. I made sure to stick with a drive that is 7200 RPM, even though the green drives (5400 RPM) run cooler and with less power consumption. In my mind, recording two shows at once while watching another show would probably tax a 5400 drive a little too much and have some stuttering. This drive had good reviews and was designed to be used for security cameras, which matches very closely to what I’m going to be using it for. In use, this drive is super quiet and I have no complaints with it at all. Beyond that, the reason I picked this one out of the other recommended DVR drives is that it was on sale.

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Media Center Kit
I chose this card after viewing my friends DVR that had it in there. It just has wonderful picture. That card fits a PCI-Express x1 slot. The card is a dual tuner, which means you can either watch 1 show and record another or record two shows at once. The “Media Center Kit” edition comes with a remote and ir receiver.

So wouldn’t you know it, my video card died and I decided to get around to installing Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 at the same time.  Of course, installing Windows 7 took over the booter, then installing Ubuntu 9.10 took over the booter and did a great job at identifying Windows 7 and OS X.  In fact, it did too good identifying OS X.

The new version of grub2 is able to work directly with OS X to start it up natively.  Unfortunately,  I like to try to not patch OS X as much as possibly, so I use Chameleon, which grub2 was bypassing.  I don’t know what a beautiful solution is, but I do know what a working solution is.

OS with Loaders:

• Windows 7 (Default Boot Loader)
• Ubuntu 9.10 (Grub2)
• OS X 10.5.6 (Chameleon 2.0-RC4)

The first step is to install OS X however you usually do it.  Once it is installed, I chose to upgrade to the latest version of Chameleon for some of the additional video card identification that it was able to provide.  All that requires is downloading from the link above and following the directions.  Before you reboot, copy the boot0 file to removable media.

The next step is to install Windows 7.  Once this is done, Windows has now taken over the boot system and you can no longer start OS X.

Finally, it is time to install Ubuntu 9.10.   Once the install has finished, it has taken over the boot screen and you will see entries for Ubuntu, Windows, and OS X.  The only issue is, if you try to start OS X, it will bypass Chameleon and start the kernel directly.

To fix this issue, make the directory /boot/chameleon and then copy the boot0 from the removable media into that directory.  Then add or update the OS X section to the following:

menuentry “Mac OS X Chameleon (on /dev/sda2)” {
insmod hfsplus
set root=(hd0,2)
search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set 88e76bb6d81f12fb
parttool (hd0,2) boot+
chainloader (hd0,4)/boot/chameleon/boot0
}

The “88e76bb6d81f12fb” is the uuid of the partition. You can find the uuid by:

# user@teh-lunix:~$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

I currently picked up a $21 Dell Truemobile 1490 wireless card to put in my MSI Wind instead of the Realtek that’s in it. It install just fine, I got it working in Windows and Linux with no issues, but OS X was another story.

It wouldn’t connect to a wireless network at all by itself. On the menu bar it wouldn’t show any wireless networks. It did show “AirPort: Not configured”. If I opened the network preferences, it would show up as Ethernet 2 off. I would have to turn it back on each time I rebooted. I would then have to select the drop down box to pick a network because it still wouldn’t show any networks in the menu bar (and the menu bar would still say not configured). I could join my network and get an IP address, but the menu bar icon would not show any bars at all. It would be right next to the access point and I could surf the net just fine though.

Thanks to a post at InsanelyMac, I was able to finally fix this issue.

1. Open Network Preferences
2. Remove all devices except Firewire by highlighting the device and then clicking on the minus sign below the device list
3. Reboot the machine
4. Open Network Preferences
5. Click the plus sign under the device list and select AirPort
6. Click Apply

Since doing that, my menu bar works, networks are connected to automatically, even after reboots.

I had the problem of taking an external syslog feed (through UDP or TCP) that came from multiple devices and then separating them into folders that identified the feeds by customers / device type / host. The one thing I had on my side was that the hostname of the devices were broken up into three parts to help me get this information.

In the old Syslog-ng (1.6.x), there was not a way to regex out this information and then use it in the destination section. Each time we had a new combination, it required writing additional lines with additional regexs. Started to really feel it on performance. With the new branch of syslog-ng (2.0.x), this feature is now available.

You can use up to 256 different $NNN ($1 … $256) macros, but you can only use one regexp expression. This will be done using a filter.

Here’s a full example of what I had done then. What I wanted to do is put the line in a specific file based on part of the hostname. For example:

Hostname: subdomain.domain.tld
Save the log files for that device at:
/logs/$TLD/$DOMAIN/$SUBDOMAIN/$R_YEAR-$R_MONTH-$R_DAY.log

WHERE $TLD is the tld of the hostname, $DOMAIN is the domain from the hostname, and $SUBDOMAIN is the subdomain from the hostname.

I would like to be able to regex this information out of the hostname to use in the destination.

To accomplish this, I was able to use this configuration:

filter f_filter { host(“^([0-9a-zA-Z\-]+)\.([0-9a-zA-Z\-]+)\.([0-9a-zA-Z\-]+)$”); };
destination f_logs { file(“/logs/$3/$2/$1/$YEAR-$MONTH-$DAY.log”); };
log {
     source(external);
     filter(f_filter);
     destination(f_logs);
     flags(final);
};

To update the MySQL server,  you really do not have to run a patch.  That is a common question I was getting from people was where to get the patch.  You actually have to patch the OS and then from there run a command on MySQL.  If you’re OS doesn’t use zoneinfo, there is even a fix for this without having to reinstall a newer version of MySQL.

Taken from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/time-zone-support.html:

If your system has its own zoneinfo database (the set of files describing time zones), you should use the mysql_tzinfo_to_sql program for filling the time zone tables. Examples of such systems are Linux, FreeBSD, Sun Solaris, and Mac OS X. One likely location for these files is the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. If your system does not have a zoneinfo database, you can use the downloadable package described later in this section.

The mysql_tzinfo_to_sql program is used to load the time zone tables. On the command line, pass the zoneinfo directory pathname to mysql_tzinfo_to_sql and send the output into the mysql program. For example:

shell> mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root mysql   

mysql_tzinfo_to_sql reads your system’s time zone files and generates SQL statements from them. mysql processes those statements to load the time zone tables.

mysql_tzinfo_to_sql also can be used to load a single time zone file or to generate leap second information:

• To load a single time zone file tz_file that corresponds to a time zone name tz_name, invoke mysql_tzinfo_to_sql like this:

  shell> mysql_tzinfo_to_sql tz_file tz_name | mysql -u root mysql 

  With this approach, you must must execute a separate command to load the time zone file for each named zone that the server needs to know about.

• If your time zone needs to account for leap seconds, initialize the leap second information like this, where tz_file is the name of your time zone file:

  shell> mysql_tzinfo_to_sql --leap tz_file | mysql -u root mysql 

If your system is one that has no zoneinfo database (for example, Windows or HP-UX), you can use the package of pre-built time zone tables that is available for download at the MySQL Developer Zone:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/timezones.html   

This time zone package contains .frm, .MYD, and .MYI files for the MyISAM time zone tables. These tables should be part of the mysql database, so you should place the files in the mysql subdirectory of your MySQL server’s data directory. The server should be stopped while you do this and restarted afterward.

Warning: Do not use the downloadable package if your system has a zoneinfo database. Use the mysql_tzinfo_to_sql utility instead. Otherwise, you may cause a difference in datetime handling between MySQL and other applications on your system.