[mythtv-users] Questions on PXE booting a frontend

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Tue Aug 4 18:10:25 UTC 2009


On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Steve
Lawrence<steve.lawrence at comcast.net> wrote:
> My advice? Give up now. Don't even try.
>
> Anyway - I took a sunday to get all this working, and had my machine
> eventually booting, loading Myth and then completely hanging on X startup. I
> have the feeling that some files weren't writable that should have been (It
> worked if I allowed my machine to WRITE to the common shared directory that
> it shouldn't have needed to, and would therefore break future diskless boxes
> which may get added).
>
> At that point I gave up and bought a diddly little SSD for my box and left
> it at that.

Interesting.  I'm at approximately the same state now.  For the
record, here are the things I discovered along the way:

o Based on a post I found on the web, I learned that nash's mount
command doesn't support NFS, so I added mount.nfs to the initrd image,
and modified the init script in the initrd image to use it:
  /bin/mount.nfs 192.168.0.205:/storage1/frontends/mythfe2/ROOT
/sysroot -o rw,user,nolock,exec,suid,dev
I don't know if those are the best mount options, but nolock was
necessary since I didn't include the lockd into the initrd image.

o Based on another post
(http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=222729), I modified the
init script to create the /dev/nfs and dev/nfsd devices:
  mknod /dev/nfs c 0 255
  mknod /dev/nfsd c 3 0

o Yet another post clued me in that when I recreate the initrd image
after unpacking and modifying it, I need to use the "-H newc" argument
to cpio, since the kernel doesn't understand the default format.  Here
is my script that automated the initrd image editing:
#!/bin/sh
IMG="initrd-nfs-`uname -r`.img"
mkinitrd -f -v --fstab=/etc/fstab.nfs --with=usb_storage "$IMG" `uname -r`
rm -rf foo ; mkdir foo ; cd foo
gunzip < ../"$IMG" | cpio -i
# Add various editing commands here
find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip > ../"$IMG"

All this lets me boot the kernel and initrd image off the memory stick
and NFS-mount the root file system.  It successfully starts all the
init services.  It starts up the X server but the system immediately
hangs, usually with a completely blank screen, but at least once I saw
the nvidia splash screen.  The timestamp on the xorg log file shows
that X has started, and the contents of the log file look normal.
/etc/mtab shows that all file systems have been mounted as expected.
The hung system doesn't respond to the keyboard and doesn't respond to
a network ping.

At this point I'm a bit stuck.  Any ideas on what to look for, or
where the system hang might be coming from?

Jim


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