MediaMVP How to

[archived]

Can someone help translate the mvpmc howto to pluto syntax

Here is what I have tried so far.

1. Setup a diskless Mediadirector for the Mvp with its Mac address. Just like another pc that is PXE booting fine.

2. Edit the mac address file it creates in the /tftboot/pxelinux.cfg directory and put the dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.0 entry in it. Bad syntax ?? Gets over written on next boot anyway.

3. I also have attempted to overwrite the vmlinuz-2.6.15-pluto-2-686 with dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.0 to no avail.

It looks like dhcp offer is sent but no connection or tftp.

Am I going about this the correct way or am I way off please help

could not find dhcp.conf to follow mvpmc logic.

Please help.

[archived]

Hi,

You can use tcpdump to see what exactly happen during boot stage:

tcpdump -i -vv eth1

DHCP config is here (at least in my installation):

Code:

/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf

Did you setup mvpmc as a Mediadirector successful? What PVR system are you going to use: VDR or MythTV?

[archived]

Thanks I did find the dhcpd.conf and tried to follow the mvpmc logic but I think the problem is that pluto is using pxelinux for the boot process and the image name has to be in the mac addrress config file. This file seems to be overwritten on reboot.




please help

[archived]

I want to pick up about 5 of these and integrate them for front ends instead of building a whole new system. Were you able to get this working? Has anyone been able to setup a Media MVP succesfully?

[archived]

I guess that if you are getting stuff overwritten on boot up then there is a script somewhere that is reading from the database and regenerating the files - similar to what happens with network setting etc.

The trick then is to find which script is doing the read and generate as it will tell you which tables etc to look in. This is where it would be much easier if someone from Pluto jumped in to help.

I assume what you are trying to do is overwrite the kernel boot file that gets sent to the diskless client. I had a quick look at how this worked some time back and there seemed to be a few dependencies on kernel versions matching between the MD and core so I am not sure that you will have much luck. Again - It would be good to know what Pluto people suggest here as there  are quite a few good MD candidates that would need a different boot kernel.

Are you builing the dongle.bin... from source? If so then you may be able to combine it with the current Pluto kernel source and get something built that pluto is happy with. If you manage to achieve this or Pluto staff have comments on it then I would love to hear about it.

Sorry can't be of more help.

regards
Darren

[archived]

I am now able to boot the MVPMC using the dongle.bin.mvpmc booting from a  windows box and configured it to be slimserver  client, works fine.

Here is the big issue why its not booting from the pluto server it does not contact the standard tftp server upon bootup. See http://mvpmc.wikispaces.com/bootservers for details.

So it looks like there is a mvprelay tool, see above link.
I am having problems locating this tool, getting some dead links.

It looks like we need to complie it from source from the MVPSERVER project.

thoughts, any help?

thanks

Tim

[archived]

This whole thing got my interest so I started looking a bit further into it as if they worked they would be great (cheap) Media Directors.

They obviously have the ability to network boot as that is how they work. This makes them appear as good candidates for MDs in Pluto land. They run linux so it should not be too hard to get pluto software running on them.

The hards bits that I see are as follows;
Pluto Media Directors take a basic linux (debian) kernel off the core and then utilise the pluto config database and scripts to source/install the software that each MD requires. This depends on what options/devices are selected in the admin environment. From what I can tell the basic kernel that the core provides is/must be the same version that the core runs and is built for intel machines. From what I have learnt the MediaMVP is not intel based and would not be able to use this kernel.

The dongle.bin file is essentially a similar type kernel (don't know what distribution it is based on - if any) that will run on the MediaMVP. Problem is that it knows nothing about Pluto and doesn't know how to source the software it requires to be a Pluto Media Director.

Assuming that a basic kernel file can be built that I guess is a combination of the two then it should (in theory) be able to get to the boot stage. The next problem is getting a base set of software  compiled for that environment and available for the initial config. In theory, I can't see why this is not possible.

This same theory would apply to any MD contender that has a linux kernel available.

My understanding of all this is pretty basic so I could have made some wrong assumptions but would really like to know what the Pluto developers opinions are and whether the software now would support this at all. Like I said previously, in the scripts that I have looked at there seemed to be code that checked that the kernel versions on the MD and the core were identical.

I am interested in getting one (or more) of these devices and having a play around with all this but would like to hear from others (especially Pluto people) if they think it is at all possible.

Another option may be to not have them as full blown Media Directors but just have them as slaves to a Media Director and write proxy devices for the media director to control the MediaMVP. I think this would be similar to how the network audio devices currently work - is that right?

Interested in some discussion anyhow.....

Regards
Darren

[archived]

There is a german guy who has developed VOMP http://www.loggytronic.com/vomp.php for VDR which makes nothing else than making the MVP usable for VDR (under Linux) while normally MVPs works with Windows. Maybe he can tell how the dongle.bin can be created and changed...