• Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
• AMD 3200XP CPU
• Airstar 2 PCI DTV Card
• Nova-T PCI DTV Card 

Ok, first thing, make sure your install of Ubuntu is up to date. If you have an orange icon near the clock. Click on it and install the updates. 

Also, for Australian users, got and sign up here for the TV Guide data.

http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiRegistration

Confirm that your DTV card is detected.

grep DVB /var/log/dmesg

[17179595.188000] DVB: registering new adapter (FlexCop Digital TV device).

[17179595.392000] DVB: registering frontend 0 (Zarlink MT352 DVB-T)…

[17179595.392000] b2c2-flexcop: initialization of ‘Air2PC/AirStar 2 DVB-T’ at the ‘PCI’ bus controlled by a ‘FlexCopIIb’ complete

 Now we need to create the mythtv user. I used the GUI to create this as previously I have had issues where I was not able to set auto login for the mythtv user. 

Once you have created your mythtv user, login as mythtv and we will install MythTV, then install some more software.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

sudo apt-get install mythtv mythtv-themes

You will be asked a couple questions on installation of above. If you haven't set your MYSQL password yet, just hit ok.

You can also grap the Australian TV grabber from here too.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~willu/xmltv/tv_grab_au_reg.html

And copy it to your /usr/bin folder. Now we need to create a folder and run the grabber with the --configure option.

mkdir /home/mythtv/.xmltv

sudo /usr/bin/tv_grab_au --configure

The --configure flag will setup a configuration file in your /home/mythtv/.xmltv/ folder called tv_grab_au_reg.

We need to edit the file and add our login details we setup for the TV Guide.

sudo nano /home/mythtv/.xmltv/tv_grab_au_reg

Either delete or comment out the iceTV guide line then put your login details in the TVGuide line. Save and exit.

Now we need to setup MythTV. 

Funnily enough the command is:

sudo mythtv-setup

Select your language and then you will be faced with 5 options. Select General and go through the setup options and set your appropriate options.

Next, we are onto the next configuration option, "Capture Cards". Select "New Capture Card" and change the card type to "DVB DTV capture card". Then finish.

Now select "Video Sources – New Video Source".

I made the "Video Source Name"

tvguide.org.au

Change the "XMLTV listings grabber" to Australia and the "Channel frequency table" to Australia also.

Now to "Input Connections".

Select your new DVB:0 input and change the video source to "tvguide.org.au".

Select "Scan for channels – Full Scan".

Your card should have tuned into each of your digital tv signals available in your area.

Now to "Channel Editor". Go through each channel and set your preferences like if it’s visable and the XMLTV ID. I also turn off the "Use on-air guide".

Initially the system will be configured for testing using:

• Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Motherboard
• 3200XP AMD CPU
• 512MB DDR Ram
• Multiple old hard drives lying around
• DVD-Rom

I am installing Ubuntu 6.10 Alternate version so I can setup LVM (Local Volume Manager) on the drive Ubuntu is installed to. I am also going to stress test the

mdadm --grow

command on a raid 5 setup with live data. To stress test the system I will install MythTV and record digital television from 2 PCI DTV cards. The MythTV install will be documented separately.

Time to begin.

Throw the alternate cd in the hit the "Install in text mode" option.

Select your appropriate language, location, keyboard etc.

I have a 40GB IDE hard drive as /dev/hda that I will use the guided partitioner to setup as shown.

If everything installed fine you should be greeted with the login screen after reboot.

The first thing you will need to do is update your Ubuntu. Luckily, I am with the best ISP in Australia, Internode, (in my opinion as well as many others, eg Whirlpool). As an added bonus, they supply an Ubuntu mirror.

I like to use SSH (Secure Shell) to remotely access my Ubuntu box as most of my programs I use are already installed and setup on another PC.

On your Ubuntu box, got to

Applications – Accessories – Terminal

and type in

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

 Now you will have SSH access from any other PC on your network. You can use Putty or the terminal in Linux to connect to your Ubuntu box. I will add Internode’s Ubuntu mirror to my sources.list file. But first, I will make a backup of the original sources.list file.

sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.original

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and add these sources

deb http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ edgy main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ edgy-updates main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ edgy-security main restricted universe multiverse 

 Then run

sudo apt-get update

 By now you probably have an orange icon up near the clock. This means that there are updates waiting for you to install. Click on the icon and let it install all updates.

Time for a coffee.

No it’s time to create a partition on each hard that you want to include in the raid 5. For this I will use cfdisk.

sudo cfdisk /dev/hdc

New – Primary – Size in Megabytes – Type

FD Linux Raid Autodetect – Write – Yes – Quit

That wasn’t hard was it? Do this for each hard drive you want to include in your raid 5 setup. I am using four drives initially and will experiment with adding another to an existing raid setup. Remember, for raid 5 you need at least 3 hard drives. Now it’s time to create the raid. On a clean install of Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 I had to manually create the device node /dev/md0 by typing:

sudo mknod /dev/md0 b 9 0

Then to create the raid I used:

sudo mdadm –create –verbose /dev/md0 –level=5 –raid-devices=4 /dev/hdc1 /dev/hdd1

/dev/hde1 /dev/hdf1

The command is spread over 2 lines.

Your hard drives should start to spin like crazy and create the raid. You can see what happening by using the command:

sudo watch cat /proc/mdstat

This will give you details such as:

Personalities : [raid5] [raid4]

md0 : active raid5 hdf1[4] hde1[2] hdd1[1] hdc1[0]

      23449152 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_]

      [>....................]  recovery =  1.4% (116876/7816384) finish=9.8min speed=12986K/sec

      

unused devices: <none>

You can also see more information about your raid using:

sudo mdadm –detail /dev/md0

/dev/md0:

        Version : 00.90.03

  Creation Time : Sat Mar 24 21:49:34 2007

     Raid Level : raid5

     Array Size : 23449152 (22.36 GiB 24.01 GB)

    Device Size : 7816384 (7.45 GiB 8.00 GB)

   Raid Devices : 4

  Total Devices : 4

Preferred Minor : 0

    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

    Update Time : Sat Mar 24 22:00:17 2007

          State : clean

 Active Devices : 4

Working Devices : 4

 Failed Devices : 0

  Spare Devices : 0

         Layout : left-symmetric

     Chunk Size : 64K

           UUID : 056d1eef:5bee0b07:fa4c7287:38ad03c8

         Events : 0.2

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State

       0      22        1        0      active sync   /dev/hdc1

       1      22       65        1      active sync   /dev/hdd1

       2      33        1        2      active sync   /dev/hde1

       3      33       65        3      active sync   /dev/hdf1

Now you will need to put information into the /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file so your operating system will know how to put your raid device back together in case something catastrophic happens. I had issues running these commands directly on the mdadm.conf file but was able to use these commands on a file in my home directory and copy to file over the existing /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file. This is what I used:

sudo echo "DEVICE partitions" > /home/user/mdadm.conf

sudo mdadm –detail –scan >> /home/user/mdadm.conf

sudo cp /home/user/mdadm.conf /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Obviously, replace "user" with your user name.

To make your new raid useful, we need to create a filesystem on it. I have gone with the tried and proven ext3 filesystem. You can try others if you like, but make sure you search for issues with raid 5 and your specific choice of filesystem.

sudo mke2fs -j /dev/md0

Now we need to edit the /etc/fstab file so Ubuntu knows where we want to raid mounted at boot time. I am going to put mine under /mnt/md0

sudo nano /etc/fstab

And add to the bottom of the list

/dev/md0   /mnt/md0   auto   defaults   0   0

Time for the fun part. Apparently the "mdadm –grow" switch doesn’t work in Edgy because of some of the kernel options used when compiling, so I am going to use the Knoppix 5.1 CD. Boot off your Knoppix CD and start up the Terminal. You will need to create the device node again the same as before.

su

mknod /dev/md0 b 9 0

modprobe raid0

I will need to find out the UUID of my existing raid so I can issue the assemble option of mdadm based on the UUID.

mdadm -E /dev/hdc1

Copy the UUID string and give the command:

mdadm –assemble –uuid=056d1eef:5bee0b07:fa4c7287:38ad03c8 /dev/md0

Make sure you use your UUID. You should get a response like "/dev/md0 has been stated with 4 drives and 1 spare" or something similar. I can now finally try the –grow option on mdadm. First you will need to partition and add your new hard drive to the md0 group then issue the grow option. Use "cfdisk" as before to create the Raid Autodetect partition (FD).

mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/hdg1

mdadm –grow /dev/md0 –raid-devices=5

Time for another coffee.

Now you should have a raid 5 with an extra hard drive. The only problem is the filesystem is still reporting the same amount of space. To fix this we need to expand the filesystem. First off un-mount the raid.

sudo umount /dev/md0
sudo e2fsck -f /dev/md0
sudo resize2fs /dev/md0
sudo mount -a

And now you should have some new space in your raid.

More to come.

References
http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man8/mdadm.8.php
http://linux-raid.osdl.org/index.php/Main_Page