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<pre wrap=""><div class="moz-txt-sig">Message: 25
Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:14:37 -0400
From: Jarod Wilson <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:jarod@wilsonet.com"><jarod@wilsonet.com></a>
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Questions on PXE booting a frontend
To: Discussion about mythtv <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:mythtv-users@mythtv.org"><mythtv-users@mythtv.org></a>
Message-ID: <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:4A74E87D.20005@wilsonet.com"><4A74E87D.20005@wilsonet.com></a>
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On 08/01/2009 09:04 PM, Jim Stichnoth wrote:
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<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap=""><span class="moz-txt-citetags">> </span>I have a Zotac IONITX frontend that I'm interested in making
<span class="moz-txt-citetags">> </span>completely diskless and PXE booting, and I have a bunch of questions.
<span class="moz-txt-citetags">> </span>Currently it boots off a 4GB USB flash drive. It is running MythDora
<span class="moz-txt-citetags">> </span>10.21, </pre>
</blockquote>
I have the same thing - an IONITX running Mythdora 10.21 for which I
didn't buy a disk, intending to setup diskless...<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap=""><span class="moz-txt-citetags">> </span>Any advice on this? Thanks,
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
>My advice would be that this mess isn't worth the hassle if its booting
>fine from a usb flash stick. I've been there, done that, and ultimately,
>found it much easier to put a small low-power storage device in the
>frontend, rather than screw around with maintaining everything required
>for netbooting w/nfs root.
<div class="moz-txt-sig">>Jarod Wilson
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:jarod@wilsonet.com">>jarod@wilsonet.com</a>
My advice? Give up now. Don't even try.
If you want to feel the pain, then here's some linkage.
There's a wiki on MythTV which will get you most of the way :
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Diskless_Frontend">http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Diskless_Frontend</a>
1) You probably want DHCP / PXE / TFTP on the same machine. You *can* run it on different machines using a next-server option, but your Router may or may not have this. It's just alot easier to put it on the same machine. I have a linux box as my firewall / gateway on which I already had DHCP set up and which needed to stay there, I was able to set the DHCP so that my front-end box got the PXE image from my backend-mythtv box using something like this :
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f7/en_US/ap-pxe-server.html">http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f7/en_US/ap-pxe-server.html</a>
<pre wrap="">>>3. How reliably does NFS work as a root file system, </pre>Pretty good - it's as stable as your machine / network. Mine worked fairly flawlessly.
>>I modified the
<span class="moz-txt-citetags">>> </span>frontend's /etc/fstab on the NFS server to mount the NFS version of<span
class="moz-txt-citetags"> </span>the root file system. I modified grub.conf to look like the<span
class="moz-txt-citetags"> </span>following,
etc.
You're better off using system-config-netboot (a fedora package to help with all this setup stuff - which you'll have to 'yum install' on your backend machine). It will cope with mounting machine specific files (which if you have *other* diskless clients need to not get changed by *other* clients etc). You end up with two directories in your NFS mountpoint, one for files shared by all machines, and one for files for each machine specifically.
Anyway - I took a sunday to get all this working, and had my machine eventually booting, loading Myth and then completely hanging on X startup. I have the feeling that some files weren't writable that should have been (It worked if I allowed my machine to WRITE to the common shared directory that it shouldn't have needed to, and would therefore break future diskless boxes which may get added).
At that point I gave up and bought a diddly little SSD for my box and left it at that.
On the other hand, I understand that Mythbuntu, or um.. some other distribution of MythTV has a smashing wizard which does all this stuff above for you. In my googling around, I found some kind of setup menu (similar to MythDora's First-boot installation web-thingy) which said 'Make me a diskless client!' and apparently it just worked.
Ultimately - Jared is right. At least as far as Mythdora is concerned - a couple of people on the list certainly have their IONITX machines running diskless, but I'm also pretty certain they weren't using Mythdora. After all the hassle I had with mine, I consider the 70 bucks for an SSD worth it...
S.
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