[mythtv-users] OT: Booting Hard Drive-less Machine

[Sasha Z]

I use pxelinux and a dhcpd setup to netboot one of my machines. It
mounts root via NFS from my fileserver. It was a total walk in the
park to setup.

First, i installed my favorite distro on a computer with a hard drive
(for simplicity's sake). Then I copied over the contents of the hard
drive to the file server's nfs share. Then I edited fstab to reflect
the new filesystem mounts. I copied over my kernel file to the tftp
server, copied over the pxelinux configuration and .0 files, setup the
dhcp server to point to the tftp server as per the directions on the
pxelinux website, and all just worked. It was remarkably painless. I
used a monolithic kernel with all the hardware support I needed but
nothing more. The kernel had several options set, like dhcp at boot,
nfs root at boot, and something else I can't remember. I haven't
touched it since 2.6.7.

I am, however, preparing a new frontend, so I'll be going through this
all over again. This time I may keep notes.

I love the diskless client. The boot time isn't much slower than a
hard drive based system, and way faster than a CD based system. It is
totally silent. It has the added benefit of allowing me to pretend I'm
on that computer with chroot from the file server for easy updates.
You can even share one nfs root between several frontends with
different home directory mounts for each.

On 3/24/06, Chad <masterclc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Evenin!
>
> I'm trying to build a new mythbox, and have been looking into a slew
> of alternative boot methods (no hard drive).  I can boot using a
> Knoppmyth CD (or any LiveCD), but need a new kernel, and want more of
> my "gentoo" feel I'm used to.  So I started building my own LiveCD,
> but am just having LOADS of problems, most of which are due to poor
> documentation (outdated, other distros, mostly Debian or Redhat based,
> etc).  So I started looking into using the PXELinux bootloader
> (Network booting) but am just going nuts figuring that out.
>
> So...
>
> For those of you who are doing truly diskless (no CD) what is your
> setup like, and do you have any pointers?  For those who have created
> LiveCD's, any hints on doing it with Gentoo and a newish system (udev,
> not devfs, 2.6.x kernel, etc)?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Chad
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