After reading some more about what can be done with MythTV, I thought I’d take the plunge.  Previously, my Media Center was running Windows 7 Ultimate with Media Center.  I have two Hauppauge HVR-2200 PCI-Express dual tuners, and an nVidia 9500 GT graphics card with HDMI output.  I also have a huge pile of recorded TV in Windows Television (WTV) format, which was quite the obstacle because only Media Center can play that.

I came across a peculiar bug with my CentOS build, which apparently also happens with Fedora, RHEL and Debian, but mysteriously didn’t happen with my Ubuntu install.

Last week I was sent by my work to do the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) course, which was a compressed 4-day course (cramming in 8 days worth of content into half the time).  It was bundled with the RHCSA certification at the same time.

Since my Microserver keeled over and died and I didn’t have a good backup in place, I was in search of a quick and easy way to back up the USB key on a regular basis so I could recover easily.

A brief discovery…  If you use a script to back up your Microserver to a mount point somewhere in your filesystem, then your updatedb database will keep growing and growing without bound.  This is bad if you’re using a USB key for your root filesystem (I went from writing a 1.5Mb updatedb database once a day to writing a 60Mb one before I caught it).

Just got around to doing this.  There’s a lot of logging that goes on by default on a Linux box, and every log message that gets committed to disk shortens the life of the USB key you’re driving your Microserver with.  As such, suppressing spurious logging is fairly important.