Here's what the Audio & Video part of the house looks like now

(click to enlarge)

There's 3 places in the house where we listen to music, theatre room, living room and sauna. Living room has it's own equipment. Theatre equipment handles the sauna speakers as well. iTunes on an iMac is used to store and organize audio collection, and also play music in theatre room.

Sauna & Living Room use the iTunes collection via MPD (Music player daemon) Wall mounted touchscreen is used to control MPD which plays the music.

Living room has diskless ubuntu HTPC which boots from gentoo server, in addition to MPD, it also runs Xine which is used as frontend for VDR, streaming SDTV content from the server. Everything in living room and then some can be controlled with Harmony 525 remote control.

Theatre room playback is handled by Plex running on the iMac. Plex used to organize video library.

So, this HTPC project has grown a bit.

Basically the whole house is now a big tech toy (including home automation with computer controlled lights, wall sockets, motion sensors, smoke detectors, temperature sensors, door sensors, etc, but that's another story, you can read more about it in the other blog. Only in Finnish though for now, sorry.)

Someone from Slashdot googled this site and didn't find enough details on my setup, so here it goes.

The client part used to be just a regular ubuntu install on a local hdd, to make it boot over NFS all that had to be done on client side was to create a new initrd and copy the hdd contents to server.

Edit /etc/mkinitramfs/initramfs.conf

#
# BOOT: [ local | nfs ]
#
# local - Boot off of local media (harddrive, USB stick).
#
# nfs - Boot using an NFS drive as the root of the drive.
#

BOOT=nfs

Create new initrd image

mkinitramfs -o /tmp/your-shiny-initrd

That's it, remove the hdd and copy the contents to server. Change boot setting in BIOS to try to PXE boot.

On the server side you need to have nfs server, dhcp server, tftp server and pxelinux package.

NFS config is really just adding one line to /etc/exports

/tftproot/diskless          *(rw,no_root_squash,async)

(replace * with proper mask if you want to be careful )

Relevant parts of DHCP server config, let's play that the server ip is 10.10.10.1 and client 10.10.10.2

option pxe-menu code 150 = text;

allow booting;
allow bootp;

subnet 10.10.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

        host diskless {
                hardware ethernet 00:40:63:E6:61:71;
                fixed-address 10.10.10.2;
                filename "pxelinux.0";
                next-server 10.10.10.1;
        } 

}

TFTP config for gentoo is in /etc/conf.d/in.tftpd

# /etc/init.d/in.tftpd

# Path to server files from
INTFTPD_PATH="/tftproot"

# For more options, see tftpd(8)
INTFTPD_OPTS="-l -p -c -s ${INTFTPD_PATH} -vvvvvv"

Now, I copied the contents of the ubuntu hdd to /tftproot/diskless/, copied ubuntu kernel and the just generated initrd to /tftproot/ and copied pxelinux.0 to /tftproot/ . Next step was to create pxelinux config it should be located in /tfproot/pxelinux.cfg/ (more info on the naming of files etc in that directory can be found here.

My diskless client config (/tftproot/pxelinux.cfg/01-00-40-63-e6-61-71)

timeout 10
prompt 1
default Ubuntu

label Ubuntu
        kernel ubu-vmlinuz
        append root=/dev/nfs initrd=your-shiny-initrd nfsroot=10.10.10.1:/tftproot/diskless ip=dhcp rw nosplash 

All set. Power on your diskless machine. You should see something like this in /var/log/messages

Nov 16 04:56:22 kippo in.tftpd[3760]: RRQ from 10.10.10.3 filename pxelinux.0
Nov 16 04:56:22 kippo in.tftpd[3760]: tftp: client does not accept options
Nov 16 04:56:22 kippo in.tftpd[3761]: RRQ from 10.10.10.3 filename pxelinux.0
Nov 16 04:56:22 kippo in.tftpd[3762]: RRQ from 10.10.10.3 filename pxelinux.cfg/01-00-40-63-e6-61-71
Nov 16 04:56:23 kippo in.tftpd[3763]: RRQ from 10.10.10.3 filename ubu-vmlinuz
Nov 16 04:56:24 kippo in.tftpd[3764]: RRQ from 10.10.10.3 filename ubu-initrd
Nov 16 04:56:37 kippo rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from diskless:864 for /tftproot/diskless (/tftproot/diskless)

Now, all that is left is to install VDR & plugins on the server and xineliboutput frontend to the client machine. On gentoo, just emerge what you need, here's my /etc/portage/package.keywords which also pretty much shows what plugins I have installed on vdr

media-plugins/vdr-xineliboutput ~x86
media-plugins/vdr-epgsearch ~x86
media-plugins/vdr-subtitles ~x86
media-plugins/vdr-femon ~x86
media-plugins/vdr-burn ~x86
net-www/vdradmin-am ~x86
media-tv/xmltv ~x86

On the client you need only xine & xineliboutput installed, then you can use vdf-sxfe/fbfe (comes with xineliboutput) or just plain xine. My client in VIA EPIA board, and it has unichrome pro chipset (mpeg2 hw acceleration using xxmc), so the command line to get the TV to show

 xine "xvdr:udp://10.10.10.1#nocache;demux:mpeg_block" --fullscreen --hide-gui --video-driver xxmc  --aspect-ratio 4:3 --post vdr -Dtvtime:method=use_vo_driver

or

 vdr-sxfe xvdr://10.10.10.1 --fullscreen --video=xxmc --audio=alsa:iec958 --aspect 4:3 --post tvtime:method=use_vo_driver

(note aspect ratio 4:3 is good for 16:9 CRT TV, logical eh)

And most like you also want to control everything with remote control so you need to install lirc and configure it properly. I won't go into details, but basically you need lirc installed on both client and server, on the client tell lirc to be on listen mode(--listen), and on server tell lirc to connect to the client(--connect=10.10.10.2).

It still works . Did some extra watchdog scripts to catch any possible errors that may happen. Now if VDR gets hung without internal watchdog catching it and if process doesn't die it is detected by a watchdog which tries to periodically access svdrp. Also some encrypted channels sometimes cause VDSB (Video Data Stream Broken) on recordings, which causes multiple restarts. It is also detected and timer is automatically removed.