This is a repost from the website www.hackourlife.com , I saw the post (with the same title) but had a hard time finding it again and again trying to setup mythtv remote frontends so I decided to put a copy here.
All credit goes to the people over at hackourlife.com
The original post is over at : http://www.hackourlife.com/setting-up-multiple-remote-frontend-for-an-existing-mythtv-backend/
Other related terms i tried to search Google for:
- How to setup a mythtv remote frontend
- Setting up a remote frontend mythtv
- How to add a mysql user for a mythtv remote frontend
After you have setup your MythTV with a master backend and frontend server setup (both of which are probably located on the same machine), you would like to install multiple remote frontends which can connect to the master backend server to let you view live TV and recording from any computer on your network. I am going to tell you how to do it on a Ubuntu 10.04 system, but it should work the same way for any Linux distribution except for the installation commands.
Before we setup the frontend on the remote machine, we need to get the machine with the backend ready to accept connections from the frontend. Here are the steps to make MySQL accept the connection from remote machines on the local area network (LAN).
Step 1: On the backend machine, open the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file in gedit by doing this
sudo gedit /etc/mysql/my.cnf
Enter the password at the prompt and then when the file opens, comment the line that begins with bind-address bu placing a # in front of it, so that it looks like this
# bind-address = 127.0.0.1
Now restart the MySQL server by doing this (note the original guide says “mysqld” but its a typo, it should read “mysql”, i fixed the typo in the command below)
sudo service mysql restart
Step 2: Again on the backend server login to the mysql by running the following command in a terminal
mysql -u root mythconverg -p
Enter the password for the root user (it might be blank if you didn’t change it during the MythTV or MySQL installation).
Step 3: Now at the mysql> prompt, enter the following to allow users from remote machines to make the connection
grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"%" identified by "mythtv";
The “%” above would allow the connection from all ips and domains, if you want to restrict it to your LAN ips, you can replace “%” with “192.168.2.%” or the suitable address as per your LAN setup.
Step 4: Now you need to change the password for the user mythtv@”%”, this is a very important step which most of the guides on the net were missing and it took me a while to figure it out for myself when I was setting up for my LAN. Ok so to do this, quit the previous MySQL prompt, by typing quit and pressing enter. Now
mysql -u root -p
Enter the password to get the mysql > prompt. Now enter the following at the prompt
set password for 'mythtv'@'%' = password('mythtv');
change the content of string inside the password box to whatever you please and if you chose “192.168.2.%” above do the same for the above step. Quit the mysql prompt. Now we need to move to the frontend machine to setup the frontend.
Step 5: For getting the front end working you only need to install the MythTV frontend component, which you can do by doing
sudo apt-get install mythtv-frontend
Once the installation gets over, launch the MythTV frontend from the Applications > Sound & Video menu, it would ask you to add to user to mythtv group, say yes and then it would ask you to logout. Log back in again and launch the MythTV frontend again. Now we would need to enter the information to do the final setup. Select your language at the first setup screen and then press next, if it doesn’t log in correctly you would need to enter the following in the setup screen:
Host name: enter the ip of your backend server (it would be detected automatically in most cases) Database name: leave it to the default value User: mythtv Password: mythtv (or the one you chose in the step 4)
Click next again to let the frontend connect to your master backend and you should be all set to watch live tv on all your frontends. HD TV works quite well, even on a 802.11g wireless connection. Free Software rocks. I would tell you soon to setup your Windows Media Center remote to work seamlessly with MythTV.