[mythtv-users] network boot / boot speed (WAS: Re: diskless Mythtv USB)

[Mark Hetherington]

On Friday 25 August 2006 01:05, gLaNDix (Jesse Kaufman) wrote:
>
> is it possible to essentially have a second install of, say, FC5 on the
> same machine so that each computer (frontend and backend) has a separate
>   root file system?  so they are completely separate installs w/o
> sharing any files (other than the myth media files, of course)

Yes, you just build another installation in a directory on your nfs server 
machine, and have the diskless client use this as it's root directory. You 
can just keep adding new directories for new clients this way, but it uses 
the full disk space of each installation for each client.

The following information is based off the debian package "diskless", although 
certainly similar solutions exist for other distros.  The "diskless" project 
allows you to have a network boot "server" (the machine that has a disk), 
which shares files as much as possible between client images. For example, 
all the installed programs can be shared (so that all clients have the same 
applications available), while each machine has it's own configuration. This 
means additional nodes take up very little extra space on the NFS server from 
which they boot. In practice you issue the command "diskless-newimage" to 
create a base image, install all the software you want on each client, then 
issue the command "diskless-newhost" to add a new node.

Mark