[mythtv-users] Best options/howto for diskless frontends

[phipps-hutton at sky.com]

Quoting Paul Gardiner <lists at glidos.net>:
> It tries very hard to work. The boot gets past the nfs mount stage and
> gets some way through the init, but then it just stops. No shell prompt,
> and I can't ssh in, so it's difficult to tell where it went wrong.  
> Here's a photo of the screen:
> http://intranet.glidos.net/~paul/boot-failure.jpg.
>
> On the server side, I can see three
> successful dhcp runs, with a tftp access between first and second, and
> an nfs mount between second and third. I feel like it's close, but I'm
> out of ideas what to try to get it the rest of the way.

It looks like a deadlock due to it trying to configure eth0. It  
probably runs if-up which usually disabled the interface before  
enabling it. As soon a sit tries to access any files while the  
interface is down it will deadlock. Your first DHCP is from the BIOS  
doing the PXE booting, the second is from the initrd when given the  
boot=nfs argument. The third is probably from if-up which will try to  
write the result to disk and deadlock.

I got around this by editing /etc/network/interfaces to say

iface eth0 inet manual

instead of

iface eth0 inet dhcp

so if-up leaves it alone. You may have to run

echo "nameserver 192.168.0.1" | resolvconf -a eth0

afterward if you want to access the internet (replace 192.168.0.1 with  
the IP address of your router).

HTH
Tim.