[mythtv-users] Diskless

[Paul Bender]

Rich West wrote:
> Paul Bender wrote:
>> Rich West wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> I looked at MiniMyth (www.linpvr.com) as an option, and my brain 
>>> screamed in agony.
>>>     
>> I am curious, what part(s) of MiniMyth made your brain hurt? At this 
>> time, I am the main MiniMyth developer. I would like MiniMyth to be easy 
>> to use. However, since I have used it for so long and know how it works 
>> underneath, I do not have good sense of when some aspect of it is difficult.
> (I responded to him directly since I thought this had drifted off topic, 
> but, since there seemed to be further interest, I'm sending it to the list)
> 
> Well, I'll be blunt.  After a tough day which started with me feeling 
> like I had no sleep and ended with my office looking like a rats nest 
> (one Sun Netra T1 hooked up with a half-functioning console, a DLT7000 
> hooked to my desktop machine, and three old beige dell's in various 
> states of Linux installs), from which I scurried out of there to work my 
> way through the horrible weather to get home.  By the time I got home, I 
> had the tinge of a headache.

Generally, prefer people being blunt and to the point. Blunt is good.

> That should set the stage. :)
> 
> I tried and tried and tried to do a simple diskless boot based upon one 
> of my mythtv frontends.  The image was rsync'ed, the GUI was installed, 
> and the system netbooted with the issues I listed in the email to the 
> list.  It failed every time with absolutely no change. :(

Sounds like you have been having a rather frustrating time.

> Every time I wandered over to look at minimyth, I got plainly confused.  
> I wasn't sure what category in the documentation was for what I was 
> trying to do (NFS boot), and I wasn't sure what arguments were to go in 
> DHCP, or on the PXE append line, or in the config files.  It made me 
> dizzy. :)

I believe the best place to start for NFS booting MiniMyth is here 
<http://linpvr.org/minimyth/document-boot.shtml#network-nfs>. If the 
instructions are not clear, please let me know using the MiniMyth forum 
<http://linpvr.org/forum/> or email.

> So, I called it quits on the diskless end of things (for now, anyway), 
> took two Advil, and wandered over to the TV.
> 
> Quite probably the thing that gets me is that, every time I look at it, 
> I say "If MiniMyth works, then why in the world won't this nfsboot 
> method work?!"  I have all of the tools in place.. it's just 
> frustrating.  And, to change gears and attempt a MiniMyth install when I 
> know it can be done.  Eh.. maybe I should just bite the bullet and 
> really try out MiniMyth.  Is it i386 or x86_64 based?

The binary version available for download is built for i386/pentium-mmx, 
because it is the least common denominator. The MiniMyth build system 
supports building i386/pentium-mmx, i386/c3, i386/c3-2, i386/athlon64 
and x86_64/athlon64. However, if you plan on building it yourself, then 
I suggest you stock up on Advil. The build takes a long time and is 
known to fail on at least one Linux distribution (FC6 x86_64).

One thing to consider before you try MiniMyth, is that it has limited 
hardware support. If you provide me the output of 'lspci -mn' using 
either the MiniMyth forum or email.

The NFS boot in MiniMyth is somewhat different from the tradition NFS 
boot. Traditional NFS boot mounts the NFS root file system read-write. 
MiniMyth mounts the NFS root file system read-only and uses unionfs and 
pivot_root to create a read-write root file system.