Hdhomerun_config scan of cable channels.

In my area, my local cable provider likes, on occassion, to change the frequency and/or program number for a channel.  Recently WRAZ, channel 13 stopped working.

When I ran the command

hdhomerun_config FFFFFFFF scan /tuner1 scan_output.log

it said something like this

SCANNING: 803000000 (us-bcast:69)
LOCK: none (ss=72 snq=0 seq=0)
SCANNING: 797000000 (us-bcast:68)
LOCK: none (ss=96 snq=0 seq=0)

us-bcast, I thought. That's wrong. When I did this last year, it selected us-cable channel map by default. I didn't have to change anything. I searched and searched the web for an answer. Finally I decided to hunt for the Silicondust config guide. I found the hdhomerun development guide. In there you can set the channelmap and change it from us-bcast to us-cable.

hdhomerun_config FFFFFFFF set /tuner1/channelmap us-cable

Now when I ran the "scan" command, I got the new frequency and program number for WRAZ.

I manually scan for channels instead of relying on mythtv's channel scanner cause I map my channels differently then the channel scanner would. I've used this config for years and would hate to jack it up.

Grub woes with my 2 TB disk

This is my first time using a 2 TB disk. After performing a Ubuntu Karmic Update on it, it upgraded the kernel and it asked "Configure GRUB using the package maintainers version". What made me do this I don't know, but I think this totally messed me up. It seemed like it deleted the bios partition.

When the disk booted, it printed the following on the screen and then just hung

GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB

The fix for this whole mess, I loaded the Ubuntu bootup USB stick, and recreated the BIOS disk partition. After doing this, I executed /usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/sda, then everything started working.

LVM2 error: Cannot add 16th partition using pvcreate

Got a 2TB disk that has 48 raw partitions that I want to add to LVM.
When creating the partitions, I thought it wouldn't let me do more then 16 partitions. I was delighted to know that I could go beyond this 16 partition limitation. I guess maybe with new disks this is not a problem?? Don't know why.

Go this error message when I was in the process of upgrading my hard disk.

#sudo pvcreate /dev/sdc16
 Device /dev/sdc16 not found (or ignored by filtering).

I reran the command with the "-vvv" option. It failed because of the following error message

/dev/sdc16: Skipping: Unrecognised LVM device type 259

After much web searching I found that this type is known as blkext

So I added the following line to lvm.conf

types = ['blkext', 50]

After doing this, I can now add all the remaining 40+ partitions to LVM.

This setup is for my mythtv production box. I use the same PC as a backend and frontend. Its not advisable I think but I have to do it this way. I use a Logical volume to store recordings. I found that my performance is greatly improved if the physical partitions are small. My thought is that this reduces seek time. I saw improvements after doing this when my PC is taping 2 HD shows and I'm watching a HD show at the same time. Maybe my theory may be wrong, but this works for me.