[mythtv-users] mythbuntu-diskless - how to set client hostname?

[Jack Perveiler]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Greg Oliver <oliver.greg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> I'm moving to mythbuntu 10.04 (for the LTS aspect -- I build my own
> >> myth binaries from source) and I want to set up my 3 netbooting ION
> >> frontends as Mythbuntu-Diskless clients according to the instructions
> >> at http://www.mythbuntu.org/wiki/network-boot-mythbuntu-diskless .
> >> The only issue so far is that when the diskless client boots, it
> >> insists on settings its hostname as the MAC address.  A related issue
> >> is that it auto-generates an /etc/hosts file whereas I would like to
> >> use a system-wide hosts file.
> >>
> >> Does anyone have experience getting this to work "right"?  Or do I
> >> need to resort to something like overriding hostname and /etc/hosts in
> >> rc.local?
> >>
> >
> > I remember digging for this for a couple of hours when I wanted my
> > router to set my hostnames.  The config file is "inside" the chroot
> > environment.
> >
> > /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/ltsp
> >
> > change OVERLAYKEY="HOSTNAME"
> >
> > and rebuild the initrd - you'll be good to go and have friendly
> > hostnames again..
>
> I made the OVERLAYKEY change, then regenerated the initrd by running
> mkinitramfs on the client, then copied the initrd to the server's tftp
> area and rebooted the client.  Now the hostname ends up being "ltsp".
> What could I be doing wrong?
>
>
I had a similar problem when I moved to mythbuntu 9.10 (never did go to
10.04).  I don't have an ltsp file in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/ltsp, but
the trick for me was to add "hostnameoverride=HOSTNAME" (just like that,
don't put in your hostname for HOSTNAME) to the kernel boot options.  My
final option line looks like this:

append ro initrd=initrd.img quiet splash hostnameoverride=HOSTNAME

I think OVERLAYKEY does the same thing, except that your copy-on-write
directory in /var/cache/mythbuntu-diskless/overlay will also be named by
hostname instead of mac address.  The old mythbuntu diskless stuff used mac
addrs in the overlay directory, and I already had overlays I wanted to keep,
so I went the hostnameoverride route instead.

I don't remember what exactly I did to get that to stick, but I have that
part appended to the following files:

/opt/ltsp/amd64/boot/pxelinux.cfg/default (/opt/ltsp/and64 is my changeroot)
/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/amd64/pxelinux.cfg/default

It's been a while, but I THINK that I changed the /var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp
version first, and then ltsp-update-kernels copied it into the changeroot?
Or maybe the other way around?  Either way, I stopped getting "ltsp" or
"(mac addr)" and started getting my hostname from my dhcp router.

Again it's been a while, but I think I got my mac address for a hostname,
made the above edits and started getting "ltsp" instead.  Eventually I
figured out that my router (running tomato) wasn't setting itself properly
to actually hand out host names if I assigned a static dhcp name through the
gui (the dhcp-host line in the dnsmasq configuration file it generated
lacked the actual host name, stupidly).  Eventually I ignored the "static
dhcp" basic configuration page for making the address static and instead
added this line to the "dnsmasq custom configuration" page in the advanced
section:

dhcp-host=(my:mac:addr),192.168.1.115,(my_hostname),1440m

I think I used wireshark/ethereal to figure out it was the router doing the
wrong thing.

Hope this helps.  If not, I'll be able to search for my own answer when this
bites me again in a year or so :)

--Jack
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20101224/e4288c36/attachment.htm>