Tivo as Network attached storage

Anyone know of hacks that will allow you to use an S2 as NAS? I found
a few threads on getting SAMBA to run on it, but it looks like
everyone gave up reading the MFS partitions.

writes:
Anyone know of hacks that will allow you to use an S2 as NAS? I found
a few threads on getting SAMBA to run on it, but it looks like
everyone gave up reading the MFS partitions.

Why? TiVo's are relatively underpowered, having all the big CPU
functions handled in hardware. The OS just has to ship bytes in and
out of the hard drives and put a menu on the screen.

The majority of the hard drive is a raw database, not a file system
that can store files. I suppose with enough hacking, you can store
files in a database rather than a file system, but its not designed to
do it, why punish yourself trying to fit the square peg in the round hole?


Older TiVo's came with puny drives by todays standards. 40G?

You'd be infinately better off selling off an old TiVo for whatever
and using that money to buy an old PC. Th PC you can buy for the same
money will be infinately more useful to you running as a NAS. There's
many PC linux distributions setup to be full NAS servers.

I suppose one could use a Tivo as a NAS. But give that it doesn't have
native ethernet hardware you're going ot be stuck using it's rather slow USB
interface. You don't "have to" use the whole drive for MFS, you're free to
reformat it however you'd like. But I'd have to imagine it's not going to
be very fast, certainly not for more than one connection. So what'd be the
point?

On 2007-12-14, Bill Kearney [email protected] wrote:
I suppose one could use a Tivo as a NAS. But give that it doesn't have
native ethernet hardware you're going ot be stuck using it's rather slow USB
interface.

The three TiVos I have all have RJ45 connections for ethernet.

--
This is my .sig

Bill and Doug,
Of corse you are right that the Tivo CPU is underpowered and if you
come off the USB it will not be that fast. But remember, I am not a
bank, I am a home user. Yah there are the times you want to load your
IPOD where you will need to move many GB, but most of the time it's
one of the kids asking to get a few digi pix or a handful of MP3s.

Doug,
Are you saying the MFS partitions are not usable by Linux? This does
not make sense to me. If the tivo apps can write to it, why would'nt
other apps assuming it knew how the partition data is formatted.

I do have a few old boxes that would probably work as NAS. Of corse
being old boxes, they have their drawbacks (higher electrical
consumption, big & ugly, BIOS support limited size drives). The tivo
is already always on, low power and already setup.

wrote in message
...
Bill and Doug,
Of corse you are right that the Tivo CPU is underpowered and if you
come off the USB it will not be that fast. But remember, I am not a
bank, I am a home user. Yah there are the times you want to load your
IPOD where you will need to move many GB, but most of the time it's
one of the kids asking to get a few digi pix or a handful of MP3s.

Oh I'm not disagreeing that such a device wouldn't be useful in the home,
far from that. More than the Tivo hardware is purpose built; just not for
that.

Doug,
Are you saying the MFS partitions are not usable by Linux?

That's exactly right. But plenty of apps have been written that use media
in ways independent of the hosting operating system. An Oracle database,
for example, can make use of raw disk partitions formatted for database-only
use. Not having to use generic operating system filesystem restrictions is
the most common reason. Often the way a filesystem is designed is to
satisfy a much wider range of requirements than a given application
requires. As a result that application would "suffer" from having to use
live within those limits. And there's little incentive for the creator of
such a format to publicize it. Not just from a intellectual property sense,
but also from support and getting stuck with legacy dependencies. If they
had everyone else using it, and they discovered a need to change it, they'd
have to then deal with the breakage those changes might cause to things not
in their control. It's a quite common, and very reasonable, approach. Is
it good for cobbling up clever add-ons, no.

I do have a few old boxes that would probably work as NAS. Of corse
being old boxes, they have their drawbacks (higher electrical
consumption, big & ugly, BIOS support limited size drives). The tivo
is already always on, low power and already setup.

But also consider you'd be putting a purpose-built device "at risk" of
failure by loading additional services onto it. All the eggs in one basket,
so to speak.

The market for a home server continues to remain elusive. More consumers
are starting to grasp the value of such a thing. It has taken much longer
for this revelation to develop than many would've hoped. The fundamental
problem could perhaps be summarized as the lack of "home computing"
solutions is the result of the programming geeks not actually having
"lives".

-Bill Kearney

wrote:
ou saying the MFS partitions are not usable by Linux? This does
not make sense to me. If the tivo apps can write to it, why would'nt
other apps assuming it knew how the partition data is formatted.

1) There are no files on the MFS partition. It is one large database.
2) TiVo apps do not write to the MFS partition. They use interprocess
communication to talk to the DB server, and it writes records to the database.

-Joe