Media center upgrade
A few fans in the old MythTV box either died (one completely ceased) or were on their way out (one had a hard time spinning and the last one was screechingly noisy). This made it overheat and shut itself down last night. What started as a trip to just replace the fans ended up with me buying a completely new box sans hard drive.
The upgrade went well since I got another AMD-based system. The video didn't immediately work, but I anticipated that would happen since I went from an AGP to a PCI-E card. The small change to /etc/X11/xorg.conf fixed the video and I hooked it all up in the living room. Surprisingly everything came up cleanly, but it couldn't see the Myth server... which is itself.
I had a hunch it was the network and confirmed that after rebooting into single-user mode by running "ifconfig -a". Heh. No eth0, but it configured eth1 via dhcp instead. Luckily I *just* ran across earlier this week - Linux caches the MAC address so the devices are always in the same place. Final reboot to ensure everything will work from a powered off state and I consider it done.
So the old box was a 256M ram, 900Mhz Duron and it performed quite adequately. The new box, slowest I could get, is an Athlon 64 X2 4400 with 2G of ram. Not only 2.5 times faster in clock alone, but dual core and much bigger cache (8X).
Overkill. Definitely overkill.
To celebrate... I'm having a Guinness at Giblin's. ;)
Slán go fóill, a chairde!