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

[phipps-hutton at sky.com]

Quoting Michael Watson <michael at thewatsonfamily.id.au>:

> On 17/08/2012 4:09 PM, 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)?
>>
> Havent ever timed it, but its boot speed seems faster than it was  
> when booting the 500GB SATA drive that use to be in the system.

It probably depends on the BIOS, my experience was a while ago with a  
VIA motherboard, The slow part was fetching Linux and the initrd from  
the tftp server. It was only a few megabytes boot took over a minute.  
Once the initrd has started it initialized the network and didi the  
rest via NFS and that was as fast as anything. I switched to just  
having /boot on a USB stick. That was faster but still had the BIOS  
fetching Linux/initrd sector by sector. Now I've got a SATA SSD and it  
boots in seconds.

Newer motherboards may be able to netboot faster but I've never found  
any data. No-one seems to benchmark BIOS speed.

Cheers,
Tim.