[mythtv-users] multiple network boot diskless frontends with seperate configurations?

Steven Adeff adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com
Thu Dec 3 20:11:35 UTC 2009


On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Brad Benson <bbenso1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Steven Adeff <adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hello all!
>>  So I've got two frontends that I would like to network boot with PXE
>> as diskless frontends. I've read many a web article on this, but none
>> give any information on how to manage multiple clients like this where
>> each client is allowed to have it's own separate "settings" so to
>> speak.
>>
>> has anyone done this? what is the key to setting up multiple diskless
>> frontends that all boot from the same server but have separate
>> environments?
>>
>
> I went down this same route about 2 years ago.  It was a bit of a pain in
> the butt, but I finally got a diskless, netbooting frontend running on a
> fedora (6 I think?) system.  After using that for a bit, and pulling out a
> little more of my hair each time I needed to upgrade something, I finally
> discovered minimyth.  It was originally designed to run on EPIA hardware,
> but works great on a lot of hardware now.  It is specifically designed to
> run on diskless machines, either netboot or booting from local media (like a
> CF card or USB thumbdrive).  It is quite configurable using just the basic
> config file and, if that's not enough, you can configure pretty much
> anything on the system using the minimyth.pm perl config script.
>
> I would highly recommend giving it a look before spending too much time
> trying to build your own diskless system.  If you already have a netboot
> server and all the required infrastructure (DHCP, TFTP, etc) setup then it's
> fairly trivial to boot up a minimyth image and try it out.  You can find the
> files and info at http://www.minimyth.org.
>
> Good luck, hope that helps you out.
>

sounds interesting, though the geek in me wants to "build from
scratch" at this time. though much like with my going from Debian to
mythbuntu/kubuntu I'll probably end up going minimyth route once I've
had enough of doing it on my own and just want it "to work".

so far I've got it booting and everything, so now I'm just setting
this boot "image" up with all the toys I want the machines to have
installed by default.

thanks for the info!

-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:Steveadeff
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