MythTV/Proxmox (OpenVZ) multi-role server from hell
Comments (0) So… I just spent two hours trying to get MythTV running properly on my OpenVZ server (installed via the Proxmox VE bare-metal installer). This is starting to be a lot harder than I thought it would be…
As seen in my previous post, I installed the 2.6.26-2-openvz-amd64 kernel and headers, and compiled v4l-dvb from mercurial, and fixed a little bug with vzctl. Today, I installed the firmware files for my Hauppage HVR-1600 (see MythTV wiki page), added the Debian-multimedia repo and installed MythTV (apt-get install mythtv). Then I realized I needed X to use mythtv-setup, so for some reason I decided to install KDE 3.5. KDE installed fine (minus some missing files for the kdm theme… wonder why these aren’t included in the kdm package or a dependency…). I then proceeded to create a password for the mythtv user ($passwd mythtv as root) and then run mythtv-setup as the mythtv user. I managed to add the sources and scan for channels, but when I tried to “Watch TV”, I was told that the primary backend wasn’t running.
I tried some troubleshooting, but it’s getting kinda late and I’m lacking sleep (as you can probably tell from my grammar), so I decided to try installing a shiny new Intel Pro 1000 Desktop (82574L) PCIe x1 Ethernet card to get my server some gigabit love. Should be simple, right? Intel cards have good driver support, with the e100 and e1000 drivers, so much so that VM solutions like VMware and VirtualBox chose to emulate them as guest hardware. Well, this was not the case today. I popped the card in to a free PCIe x1 slot and powered on the PC. Link lights went on and all looked fine and dandy. But once the machine fully booted up (takes a while with all those OpenVZ containers 😉 ), ifconfig showed only the eth0 interface, which is my built-in Realtek/nForce controller. Some further probing with lspci and dmesg showed that the card is alive, but that the e1000 driver didn’t even bother to start up.
At this point, I GIVE UP for tonight. I’m cold from sitting down in the basement, tired from lack of sleep, and frustrated from uncooperative Linux servers.
No streaming TV for me tonight, but I suppose I should be glad that at least the blog is still up and running.
Which brings to mind http://xkcd.com/349/
Themocracy