[mythtv-users] Diskless

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Tue Jan 30 21:46:25 UTC 2007


Dave Ansell wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Rich West" <Rich.West at wesmo.com>
> To: "Discussion about mythtv" <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 5:50 PM
> Subject: [mythtv-users] Diskless
>
>
> I came across the diskless how-to on the Wiki and, while I have the
> entire infrastructure in place (I build both windows and Linux boxes via
> PXE booting), I immediately thought "hey, that would definitely be QUIET".
>
> However, the question that goes unanswered in the wiki is about
> performance.  Since the entire system is loading and running off of the
> network (I've got cat-5 wired) *and* mythtv is also going over that same
> network, doesn't that beat up on the performance?  Especially since swap
> would also be on an NFS mounted volume...
>
> I'd be interested to hear about people's experiences with MythTV and a
> diskless frontend to see if it would be a viable configuration or if it
> is just a pipe dream..
>
> Thanks!
> -Rich
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
> Hi Rich,
>
>      Definitely doable.   I had a completely fanless, diskless front end for 
> a while.
>
>      However, I found:
>
> (a)  performance even on 100 wired was less that a with a disk fitted
> (b)  it was harder to set up
> (c)  it was less reliable, a few lost packets and you might be dead!
>
>     Eventually I reverted to hdd fitted.   However to keep it silent I 
> fitted a 3.5 inch samsung laptop drive, soft mounted on a rubber band 
> arangement.    It is virtually inaudible - the 3.5 inch drives are much 
> quiter than 5.25 and performance is near enough the same.    Just a cheap 
> adapter needed to make the connection.
>
>     I dont think I would go back to diskless now.

Thanks for all the great responses.  I have one system that I built with
an *old* hard drive.  Noisy as anything.  I built three of them this
month and deployed them throughout the house and I really didn't want to
sink money in to the hard drive when I really needed to upgrade the
video card (just did).  I thought that this system would be an ideal
candidate for trying out the diskless solution.

One person had an interesting setup where they mounted the filesystem
read-only and mounted tmp as a tmpfs filesystem.

I figure it's worth trying since I already have most of it set up.  It's
just a matter of setting up the diskless tree properly.

BTW, reliability isn't too much of an issue since lost packets get
re-transmitted (unless you are running NFSv2 which is UDP based), but
you shouldn't get lost packets. :)

-Rich


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list