[mythtv-users] Looking for MicroATX AM2 CPU supporting motherboard suggestions.

[Mark J. Small]

On November 5, 2008, Jeff Holicky wrote:
> Interesting.  I haven't fully explored a method of booting over a
> network.
>
> Your idea sounds pretty good.  Your BE is the server that would serve up
> a full or partial "network version" of Linux.  I figure that if the BE
> goes down (whatever reason), if I stored recordings on a standalone
> network HDD, then at least I could still watch those.
>
> The CF / SD memory has limited writes.  Not such a problem when doing
> things like music/videos since the amount of writes are small, but I am
> wondering about logs.  Are you suggesting that there is little to no
> writing to the CF card each time it reboots?  Once it fully boots are
> all logs stored on the BE?
>
> On the downside - if the boot was fully on the BE, if the network goes
> down you are cooked.  I suppose are you are not better off in that case,
> but it would eliminate some networking problems (obtaining info) with
> your scenario.
>
> The best of all worlds - being able to fully run a diskless (not via CD;
> not starting with NIC) via a larger 2-4GB CF card - and then at some
> point during the process flip the logs over to the BE -- if it is up;
> otherwise write them to the CF card but alert the user. Again that would
> allow the machine to come back up and be available for something instead
> of DOA.
>
> Are there any web resources on how one would break up the boot process
> like this?
>
> (logs such as messages etc - anything)
>
> jahsr
>
> ----- Original message -----
> From: "Krzysztof Adamski" <k at adamski.org>
> To: "Discussion about mythtv" <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
> Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:35:30 -0500
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Looking for MicroATX AM2 CPU
> supporting      motherboard suggestions.
>
> I boot my FE from 256MB CF connected to a IDE to CF converter. Very
> simple way of making the FE be diskless. The / is on the CF, the /usr
> and /var are on the BE.
>
> K


I did a similar thing with a hard drive when my FE wouldn't do network booting 
properly. I used HDparm to spin down the drive after booting.  (A bios update 
finally fixed that problem)


I think the hard disk had a small FAT partition, and I used syslinux to load 
the kernel.  The rest of the setup was identical to using PXE booting over 
the network.

Mark