[mythtv-users] Thin client frontend

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Fri Sep 24, 2010 at 08:08:37PM -0400, Raymond Wagner wrote:
> If you're using NFS as your remote rootfs, that would cause problems.  
> With NFS, symlinks are handled client side, meaning you would need the 
> main image mounted in the proper location for the links to be resolved.  

The way I do it doesn't require any symlinks.  I have a shared
nfsroot directory on the fileserver along with a private non-shared
etc, tmp and var/log for each frontend.  Each frontend boots off the
same nfsroot image, but then /linuxrc takes over and mounts up the
private copy of /etc, /tmp, and /var/log, then execs /sbin/init so
the system can keep booting normally with its private data intact.
Granted, this does share some things that can be written to, but this
config has worked for me for at least the past 5 years or so.  I
started it with Fedora 5 and my latest image is CentOS 5.x based.
I have one machine that I consider the primary, so if I need to add a
rpm or compile something I either do it there or I login to my fileserver
and chroot into the nfsroot directory.

Frontend df looks like this:

[cpinkham at alive ~]$ df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root             75091776  62812416   8403280  89% /
192.168.3.107:/taz/usr2/nfsroot/192.168.3.51/etc
                      75091776  62812416   8403280  89% /etc
192.168.3.107:/taz/usr2/nfsroot/192.168.3.51/tmp
                      75091776  62812416   8403280  89% /tmp
192.168.3.107:/taz/usr2/nfsroot/192.168.3.51/var/log
                      75091776  62812416   8403280  89% /var/log
/dev/root             75091776  62812416   8403280  89% /
tmpfs                   256680         0    256680   0% /dev/shm


--
Chris