I want one box with actual hard drives in it.
A terabyte volume for data (archived software, DVR content, etc).
A 500+GB volume for "home" data. Documents, images, software projects, etc.
A terabyte volume for backing up particular data from the other two locations.
This box will have a TV Tuner card, also.
Then, I want a few thin-ish clients around the house. I want them to boot from little USB flash drives (no internal HDD) or possibly even over PXE and TFTP, and mount the software/DVR volume over the network. Then boot to a generic guest account automatically and connect to a MythTV environment.
I want the ability to log out that guest account on demand, and log in to a user-specific environment (root, me, etc).
Can I install Ubuntu or another distro to a USB flash drive? Or do I have to get a SATA/IDE adapter doo-dad like G98 was doing awhile ago? I think a local flash drive would perform better for my multimedia objectives than a PXE/TFTP environment.
I want /home and another location (/tv, probably) to be mounted either via NFS or iSCSI. I think iSCSI can only be connected to a 1:1 ratio over the network (only 1 client can connect to an iSCSI resource at a time, IIRC), so probably NFS. I want authentication to be controlled from a central resource (the box that has HDD's will run some LDAP or similar authentication mechanism).
And: Anyone have any knowledgeable work-arounds for the fact that NetFlix on demand doesn't work on Linux? Aside from a virtualPC installation? I guess I could have a default "guest" account for mythTV related use, and a logout/login process for a user called "netflix" that launches a VirtualBox VM in full screen mode, but if that user logs in at more than one terminal in the network then I could have problems with the VM.