[mythtv-users] Has anyone configured a "semi"-diskless frontend?

[Brad Templeton]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 03:57:41PM -0600, Robert Kulagowski wrote:
> I have a number of frontends, each with local storage.  I have a master 
> backend which is already serving as a DHCP / TFTP / NFS server to a 
> MediaMVP and my frontends.
> 
> What I'd like to do is take my existing frontends (one a Debian 
> unstable, one a FC2) and set them up as semi-diskless; boot off the 
> local storage, then switch to using NFS for everything else, at which 
> point I can spin-down the local hard drive, reducing noise.
> 
> I'm not really interested in a complete diskless system, and the various 
> HOWTO's that I've seen pretty much revolve around netbooting / PXE.
> 
> Has anyone already done something similar?

I almost got this working but bailed out when I had troubles getting
X to start.  May be a small thing, may be more work, but I had other
stuff to do.

This is actually a good idea if, like me you have spare old disks lying
about, too noisy to leave running all the time.  Put them to two
uses -- 1 to boot your system, and 2 as a place to store backups for
long term.   You can either spin up the disks to get at the backup, or
even do nightly backups to them by spinning it up at a time nobody will
care about the noise.  Not good for bedroom.

The advantage is you don't have to make netboot work.  And it's faster.

However, you probably want to only load the kernel from the disk.  Have
it mount the root FS over NFS.  This requires you to get a kernel with
nfs, nfsroot, your ethernet card etc. pre-compiled in, or use initrd to
have a ramdisk with the modules.    It is not too hard to make one, I did
not find a suitable one floating around though there are such kernels
people have.     

1) Get your system working on the disk you have, with special kernel

2) Mirror it to the NFS partition.

3) Modify grub with a new entry to boot to include all the nfs root options

4) Try it out.