[mythtv-users] Thin client frontend

Nick Rout nick.rout at gmail.com
Sat Sep 25 04:39:48 UTC 2010


On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>wrote:

>  On 9/24/2010 18:56, Tyler T wrote:
>
>> I run about six to ten FE's (depending how one defines these).  The admin
>>>> load is a draggg so a central model has some advantages
>>>>
>>> If I had multiple frontend clients and needed to
>>> upgrade I would upgrade the server and only one copy of the frontend
>>> netboot
>>> image, then copy that frontend image for all the other frontends.
>>>
>> I'd softlink all the various FE rootfs-es to accomplish the same thing
>> while saving 6-10X disk space and improving performance (6-10X more
>> efficient use of disk cache).
>>
>
> If you're using NFS as your remote rootfs, that would cause problems.  With
> NFS, symlinks are handled client side, meaning you would need the main image
> mounted in the proper location for the links to be resolved.  You could
> hardlink the files if they were on the same physical disk, but then you
> might end up with problems updating the files.  Most systems with that setup
> either alter the environment so all those folders can remain read-only, or
> they use something like UnionFS or AUFS to provide a write-able overlay
> against the shared read-only root.
>
> I use something similar for my systems.  I maintain a single x64 gentoo
> disk image that I keep up to date.  Whenever I want to update my systems, I
> clone copies of that image, and share the copies over iSCSI.  When the
> system boots up for the first time on that fresh image, they log into NFS,
> pull an overlay of various config files, and my themecache, and then reboot
> into their own differentiated image.  Since they're running on copy-on-write
> cloned images, the only storage they take is whatever their overlay
> consumes.  That also means its fairly cheap to keep around multiple old
> snapshots, so if an upgrade fails, it only takes me a few minutes to switch
> back to the old image.
>
>

surely in a netboot+nfs scenario you don't need a full filesystem for each
client? I've not set one up in a while, but that certainly wasn't my
recollection.
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