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

[Fred Watt]

On 17/08/12 10:14, Michael Watson wrote:
> 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.
>
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I use iscsi on al least 3 ubuntu 12.04 pc's ... all run mythfrontend one 
is a slave/frontend.  From the performance perspective the boot is a 
little slower than a 'average h/d', but once booted there is no 
noticeable performance loss.  It's a great way to centralise all the 
virutal disks (for backup/upgrade) and allows for a more robust setup as 
the virtual disks use storage on a raid device.  This is served from an 
atom/ubuntu server which performs many duties including iscsi targer/ 
myth masterbackend (tunerless, tuners on slave)/mysql/mail server and 
others.

I use gpxe served from an 'always on' low powered alix (voyage) box, but 
before I had one of these I ran gpxe from usb sticks plugged into each 
diskless client (good first step).  I also used the gpxe to perform a 
WOL to wake the server - if needed - during the boot process.

May a little painful whilst sorting out everything.  But now I have 
virtual disks for all devices which can also dual boot.  I followed 
these instructions - 
http://etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/ubuntu_iscsi#installing_ubuntu_directly_onto_the_iscsi_san. 
Been running like this for well over 2 years now.