[mythtv-users] Disk space for frontend-only machine

[Raymond Wagner]

On 8/17/2012 02:09, Phill Edwards wrote:
>> You don't happen to have a record of how you set up the iscsi?  The iscsi backend is easy enough, but I think I need to get PXE to boot gPXE which works with iscsi.
>> I'm currently netbooting the cd image (pxe + nfs) but its read-only and a real pain having to reset the timezone and volume every time (FE is a laptop) - it lowers the WAF considerably.
>
> I've never tried setting up a network boot. Isn't it slow to boot? If
> you have to transfer a few GBs of data for the MythTV frontend image
> doesn't that take a long time (even over a gigabit network it's going
> to take some time to transfer all that data)?

On my test system at my desk, it takes around 15 seconds from startup 
until the boot ROM initializes.  Due to something funky with my network 
card, it takes 20 seconds before it turns on and pulls an address. 
Downloading PXELinux and my custom kernel is near instant.  The kernel 
stalls for the same 20 seconds waiting for the network to come back up 
again, and then mounts root over iSCSI. Then it's about 20 seconds for 
the terminal to come up, and another 20 for X11 and mythfrontend to load.

All told, I'm looking at 40 seconds of my time, another 40 due to NIC 
funkiness, and 15 for BIOS startup. While MythTV is starting, 10-15s of 
that is peaked at 11-12MB/s, which is now cause for concern as now I 
have to figure out why my machine is negotiating at 100Mbps rather than 
gigabit.

In any case, I normally just suspend the machine, so boot time really 
isn't a big issue.