[mythtv-users] Diskless Front End (again)

[Neil Sedger]

Jeff Coffler wrote:
 >First, if you haven't looked at the Wiki, you MUST:
 >http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Diskless_Frontend#Redhat_and_Fedora_Core
 > It's a fantastic starting point.

Indeed!
Notably for the fixes to the initrd created by a buggy 
system-config-netboot, which I failed to find noted anywhere else... 
especially in Red Hat's docs or knowledgebase.


 > 3b.1) Modify the mount of the .snapshot area to include -n (no write
 > access to /etc),

I'm glad someone else thinks this is right too :-)
I think this should be added to the wiki.

 > 3b.2) Add a line after that mount to remount the .snapshot area RW
 >(not sure why it gets mounted RO, but it does)

This is why:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/18/264



I got mine booting yesterday...
A problem with mount -n is that the remount in 3b.2 above doesn't work 
because it expects an entry in mtab. For some reason my nfsroot's 
/etc/mtab is a real file, NOT a symlink to /proc/mounts.

I spent a while trying to use 'mount --bind' to replace /etc/mtab with 
the one from the ramdisk (now in .oldroot) or directly with /proc/mounts 
- but neither of these worked. Probably something to do with trying to 
--bind to a child of a 'special' filesystem (proc) or trying to --bind 
to a file which is a symlink to said. Is there a 'mount' option I'm 
missing which will let me do this?

So I changed the nfsroot's /etc/mtab to a link to /proc/mounts, and it 
started booting.
I gave it a good 5 mins after it said 'starting /sbin/init' but had to 
give up due need for sleep... I'm hopeful that I might have it sorted 
though!
Could there be something slowing down this '/sbin/init' process, or is 
there a way to get it to output stuff to the screen as its going like 
disklessrc does?


Cheers
Neil