[mythtv-users] Failure at setting up diskless mythtv-frontend.

Chris Rouch chris.rouch at gmail.com
Wed Jun 20 14:19:27 UTC 2007


On 6/12/07, clemens at dwf.com <clemens at dwf.com> wrote:
> I have spent what little spare time I have this last week trying
> to setup a diskless frontend for MythTV.
>
> It seemed like a good idea,- the less stuff I have in that box the
> better, less heat generation means its going to be quieter, and I
> have done Diskless machines with SunOS (tho that was probably
> 10 years ago or more), it just cant be that hard...
>
> Well, I followed the instructions out on the WEB for a diskless
> Linux machine (actually under MythTV) and was very unhappy.
> It seemed clear with their read-only root and writable changes
> mounted to it, I was going to spend the rest of my life findint where
> various programs wrote scratch files that the author hadnt run
> down.
>
> So I said, how hard can this be?
> After all Im only going to have ONE diskless machine, not many
> so the read-only root with  changes doesnt make any sense.  Just
> put a read-write root out there and run with it.  Well I got to 'step1'
> and honest boot, with two tries.  But from there on, I have yet to see
> the rc scripts run...  everything (say udev) depends on the existance
> or non-existance of /proc and /sys, and even when /proc is umounted
> its still there and the scripts fail...  No Idea how this works in a
> real boot.
>
> So, if anyone has tried, and succeeded with this, a diskless mythtv-frontend
> Id like to hear from you, and get some feeling for what you did.
>
> Other than that, after I come back from USENIX, I guess Ill just
> invest in a small, cheap, LOWPOWER (how do you find out about
> that) disk, and give up on the diskless part.
>

I have diskless working for both FC4 and FC6. I ran
system-config-netboot on the server, rsyncing the files from a working
system as instructed. For FC6 there are/were a couple of bugs, the
workarounds for which are on the mythtv wiki. AFAIR FC4 just worked.

If it doens't work, unpack the initrd.img created (or copied) by
system-config-netboot, and set debugging on in the disklessrc script,
then repack it and see what happens when you boot, i.e.

zcat initrd.img >| /tmp/initrd
mount -o loop /tmp/initrd /mnt
edit /mnt/disklessrc
umount /mnt
gzip /tmp/initrd
mv /tmp/initrd.gz initrd.img

HTH,

Chris


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