[mythtv-users] How does the diskless setup work?

Michael Carland mcarland at bitsgonewild.net
Tue Jun 7 14:00:57 UTC 2005


On Jun 7, 2005, at 7:32 AM, Mark J. Small wrote:
> I ran a diskless frontend until recently.  It is really nice if when 
> you get
> it working.  Unfortunately, when I upgraded the motherboard on the 
> frontend,
> PXE just stopped working altogether.  Now I have a small hard drive 
> that I
> boot from using syslinux.  I still have my root drive on nfs, and I 
> spin down
> the rather loud local drive during boot.
>
> Running diskless really is a great way to cut down the noise, and 
> there is
> plenty of documentation out there on how to do it.

One idea if PXE doesn't work, or you don't have PXE, and you still want 
a silent machine, would be to boot from flash (or even floppy). I have 
a CompactFlash to IDE adapter, that can be used to load a kernel, and 
the rest could be loaded from network. If the motherboard supports 
booting from a USB drive, this would do the same thing. You could even 
load the kernel from a floppy, although when I used to do this the same 
floppy sitting in the same drive for months on end would need to be 
replaced once or twice a year. Not exactly diskless in that case, but 
other than 30 seconds at boot, there is no drive noise.

-Michael




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