Diskless media director - How many hours does it take to boot?

[cirion]

I have installed a server with Core only, and followed the Wizard in the admin site.
I have also installed a Orbiter in Windows Vista.
I have run the Diskless orbiter wizard.
I have given up trying to boot my HTPC wich has a Asus 8N32-SLI Deluxe mainboard with 2 PXE enabled "Kernel Panic" cards.

Now, trying to boot a diskless laptop with PXE, it connects to the core and my Orbiter asked me a few questions and a lot happens on the Media Director exept getting a GUI. After a while it stopped after "* Starting Samba daemons..."

I have tried rebooting the MD, and rebuilding it in the Admin site. Now I have tried waiting for 2 hours...

How many hours does it take to boot diskless?
Will Linux MCE support at least one of the Nic's on an Asus 8N32-SLI Delux motherboard any time soon?

[cirion]

Now I see progress.....

* Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server....
* Starting NFS Common Utilities

And I am still waiting...

How much time should a first boot of a diskless MD take?
What is the normal boottime after the first boot?

[cirion]

Some more progress..

* Starting RAID monitoring service mdadm --monitor
* Starting periodic command scheduler...
* Running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local)

How loong is this going to take?!?

[cirion]

Cannot say how loong it took, but when I woke up this morning I got the setup wizard
Never got to the gui before I went to work.

This setup is SLOW!

[sharlee_angelo]

what cpu do you have on MD? i have a MD with Intel Celeron 1.6 ghz and the setup takes about 2 hours.

[cirion]

It's a laptop with a broken and removed screen, so it looks like a keyboard with touchpad
P4 Mobile 1.8ghz, 1GB ram and 100mbit nic. No HD.

And now it finaly entered the GUI.

So the first thing to try is a reboot.... How long time does your MD use on normal boot?

[norcal]

When  you are first setting up a media director it will take a while, i could see 2 hours being a possibility, because it has to build an entire boot image for the media director. However once the image is built, and after you have done all the avwizard setup it only takes 30 seconds or so for it to boot the media director.

[cirion]

30 seconds sound great!

But this MD takes 43minutes!!!

But my biggest problem is that I can not use LinuxMCE for anything but show the gui...

DVD - Not working
Video - Nothing
Pictures -Nothing
Music - Nothing

When I insert a DVD the screen goes black and then goes back to the GUI after a few minutes.

I have a Thecus N5200 NAS with 3TB and after a few days LinuxMCE found it... But I can not see any media from it.
All it has done is make a new set of folders on the NAS, and I have tried moving my media into those folders, but still, nothing shows on LinuxMCE.

When going to the Media Browser in the Admin site, there is nothing... How do I find my media?

[rictec]

get gigabit network cards and you will see whats fast....boot

[Juliet Smith]

To play dvds you need to have some pieces of software installed: libdvdcss and id-my-disc. you can install them from the video wizard / add software section, or by hand in a console:
apt-get install libdvdcss
apt-get install id-my-disc
sometimes, the installation from the wizard fails, so it' s better to try the other way. Then , you will be able to play your dvds.
your media is discovered if it is shared over the network. The internal network is automatically scanned for shares from time to time and you will be asked to add your shares when they are detected. If they are not detected automatically, you can try to add them manually. See these links also:
http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Howto:_Using_Network_Shares
http://forum.linuxmce.com/index.php?topic=1347.0

[cirion]

Thanks, that should solve my DVD problem...

But my problem with my media is not that LinuxMCE does not find my NAS shares. But that it does not find my media on that NAS.
LinuxMCE has made a new folder tree, Public, User1 and User2 and subfolders in those with music, pictures and video. I have moved my media in to those folders both in public and in the users, and rebooted the core and still no media.

My Core has been up and running since Sunday and there is a lot of traffic on my network.

My Core is a P4 2.4ghz with 2 nics, one of them gigabit. 1GB ram and a IDE Raid5 card with 5x300GB disks + a 40GB bootdrive. The raid is not found, but the 40GB disk works fine. I have tried copying som videos and pictures to the Core but I can not see those either.

The Core is connected with gigabit to the Thecus N5200 NAS. The Core is now my DHCP server and router/firewall.

My diskless/screenless laptop does not have a gigabit port And my laptop with gigabit cannot be connected since I have no other Orbiter.

I have a i-mate JasJar with Windows Mobile 5 but the orbiter software does not work on it, it goes out of memory and the screen goes black.

I have a Nokia 6680 wich is a Symbian Series 60 that could be uses as an orbiter, but the bluetooth dongle on my diskless/screenless laptop does not find it.

[cirion]

Oh and my HTPC wich I really want to use as a MD as it does have 2 gigabit ports, and a HVR 4000 card connected to both my cable TV and a Satellite dish with a motor.

Its a AMD 64x2 4200+, 2GB ram and is connected to my 40" LCD in the livingroom.

None of the 2 PXE compatible integrated Gigabit nics work. I only get a "Kernel Panic".

[sharlee_angelo]

what gigabit cards do you have? i mean the manufacturer of the cards.

[cirion]

On the HTPC there is a Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard with 2 integrated gigabit nics.

This is from the manual:
LAN:
Marvell® PCI Express Gigabit LAN controller
Marvell® Gigabit LAN PHY
NVIDIA® nForce4 SLI built-in Gigabit MAC with external
Marvell Gigabit LAN PHY supports:
- NV ActiveArmor
- NV Firewall
- NV RIS (Remote Installation Service)
- AI NET

[cirion]

mce@dcerouter:~$ sudo apt-get install libdvdcss
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package libdvdcss is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package libdvdcss has no installation candidate