Migrated all Data to the core - Experiences

[seth]

 
High all,

Last evening I took every bit of disk storage I had, and placed it on the Core server in the basement.
It was a mix/matched bunch of internal and external disks, and now they are all centrally located.

My reasoning for doing this was 2 fold. I was having issues with my Living Room MD, which uses the NVIDIA forcedeth driver for network, and I was getting a rash of CIFS and NFS timeout errors in dmesg and the logs. This was causing my core to eventually lock up, as the errors were consistantly getting more and more. This would then take down all my MD's as the core was hosed up, and angry.

The second reason I did this, is so that no matter what I do in the house now, I know my media will be available to all other MD's.

I have just ordered a new Motherboard and CPU for the living room:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131324
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103211
Which are on a combo deal right now for $114.99 Free shipping.
This board uses a broadcom based on board 10/100/1000 NIC, and is reported to be supported well. My core has 2 Broadcom Gigabit NIC's currently. It also has HDMI, DVI, and Optical SPIDF out. More will follow after I try to install it, I will post it to the wiki. It does have ATI graphics, but we shall see if that causes an issue or not.

Back to the topic, If you are experiencing an excessive amount of CIFS, and Network related issues, and you have the opportunity, try to centrally locate your storage, or use NAS type, this resolved all my issues, even though I am replacing the system board and CPU. It made quite a difference in the amount of times it popped up the annoying (Added blah-blah drive blah-blah) and now when using the FaM menu in the web admin, Media Files Sync just flies. It is much faster than it was, when the storage, internal and external was connected to the MD with the bad NIC.

Anyways, just my 2 cents. I hope if anyone is experiencing this issue, give it a try, centralize everything. After all that was the original intent of the core anyways. 

Regards,

Seth

[Steve]

That is how the system is suppose to be set up. So you were right in what you did.

[colinjones]

That is how the system is suppose to be set up. So you were right in what you did.

I'm sorry, I don't understand this comment - do you mean that the system is supposed to be set up with media centralised? If so, then for the benefit of future readers I must immediately disavow you of this idea. Whilst I understand why Seth did this, LMCE is certainly not "supposed" to be set up with centralised media... far from it, either is fine, but it is best practice to keep your media separate.

[Steve]

Sorry! I didnt mean to sound ugly. I should have reread what i wrote but was in a hurry. I had everything seperate. and that was a big mess until I also moved everything to the core that meant tuner cards, hard drives and all media files etc.etc. It runs so much smoother. now when something goes wrong I know just where to look.
The core. all of my md's have nothing but the motherboard and or video card, thats it

[colinjones]

For the record, all my media is on the network, none is local to the core or any MD, and this configuration works flawlessly. I would guess that the majority of people have their LMCE set up this way, and it is definitely the only way I would recommend going. When LMCE is installed as designed (ie, 2 NICs, DHCP, etc) there are a small number of known situations where you may have problems, all of which can easily be solved by reference to these forums or the wiki.

I can only recall 1 other instance where the solution was ellusive, and I believe that was solved eventually (patch cables or switch I believe). I am not saying that centralising media to the core is invalid, and certainly some people do this to make use of LMCE's RAID functionality, I just want to make sure that future newbies reading this thread are not put off using LMCE's considerable smarts to consolidate networked media resources transparently.

[seth]

 
All on the NAS. Are you recording any TV shows. If so, where do they go. Still to the core, or on to the NAS?

If so, please tell me how you configured your system.

I have been keeping my TV recordings on the core, as to the default install. I wouls love to isolate the core drive to just have the OS and the MD images.

Thanks,

Regards,

Seth

[colinjones]

the plan is to record locally, but I'm not using it for live tv at the moment....