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

[Kevin Kuphal]

Sasha Z wrote:
> 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.
>   
Quick question.  I'm setting this up now and I made some of the 
environment (PXE, etc.) using the redhat-config-netboot script.  I have 
a /root and a /snapshot folder but I'm having trouble understanding how 
I work with the temporary filesystems like /var.  The redhat setup made 
/root RO and /snapshot RW.  Did you end up with a similar setup or do 
you just have it all in root as RW?

Kevin