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

[Chad]

On 3/24/06, Sasha Z <kleptophobiac at gmail.com> 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.

:cry:

I must be totally missing the boat on this.  Most of the tutorials
seem to feel the same as you, it just works.  Follow these directions
and it works.  I don't doubt that, I guess I should just follow the
directions line by line and see if it 'just works' for me too.  I
think my straying on certain parts is probably what's killing me.  I
just really was hoping for a Gentoo setup for all this, and was also
cross-breeding my environment for Live-CD; plus trying to include a
lot of things from different how-tos for whatever reason (different
distro, different kernel series, etc.)  I'll drop the LiveCD setup and
concentrate on the PXE to see how that goes.

Thanks for the follow up!

Chad