[mythtv-users] Question about diskless system

Norman Lyon yourdog at poboxes.com
Thu Mar 31 18:54:08 UTC 2005


I've seen from time to time folks talking about using a diskless setup, but I'm
having problems seeing what their results are like.  I just set up an old piece
of hardware to see if I could do it (since the spare hard drive I have is VERY
noisy).  It appears to work as a front-end, but it's slow when skipping ahead
or back.  This also could be due to the fact that I'm playing back 720x480 on
an Athlon 650.

Does anyone have performance data to provide on their diskless setups?  If I
were to rebuild to a Celeron D 2.5G and add a 878 grabber, would I still be
able to use this diskless setup and be happy with performance as both front-end
and a diskless backend (streaming to my other backend/database/etc)?

For my config's sake, my primary backend is providing the NFS root image, and
I'm using the noisy hard drive to provide the etherboot zlilo image to netboot
off a PCI NIC (the on-board NIC is too flaky to use).  If I don't want swap
space or anything else on the hard drive, and I'm running XFCE (stripped debian
build) is 256MB enough, or should I keep it at 512MB just to be safe?  Or is
there a good reason why I should throw swap onto the noisy drive and just hope
that the 'hdparm -S' timeout keeps the drive dpun down (with either 256 or
512MB)?

Thanks,
Norman


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