In order to configure a remote MythTV server, I had to run mythtv-setup remotely over an ssh connection with X forwarding:

ssh -X mythtv@machine

For most config options, I can either use the configuration menus inside of of mythfrontend (over a vnc connection) or the Settings section of MythWeb, but some of the backend and tuner settings are only available through the main setup program.

Unfortunately, mythtv-setup won't work over an ssh connection by default and prints the following error in the terminal:

$ mythtv-setup
...
W  OpenGL: Could not determine whether Sync to VBlank is enabled.
Handling Segmentation fault
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

The fix for this was to specify a different theme engine:

mythtv-setup -O ThemePainter=qt