[mythtv-users] Mythbuntu-diskless - can a client survive a server reboot?

[Jim Stichnoth]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 8:16 AM, Eric Sharkey <eric at lisaneric.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have 3 diskless frontends running a mythbuntu-diskless environment.
>> If I reboot the server, the frontends become pretty much unresponsive
>> and have to be rebooted.
>
> I haven't used mythbuntu-diskless, but I've done NFS root systems
> before and never had this problem.  Yes, the clients will become
> unresponsive while the server is down, but they should recover after
> the NFS server is available again.

I do believe that an NFS root file system should be resilient across a
server reboot.  The difference in mythbuntu-diskless, at least in the
default configuration, is that it doesn't use NFS for the root file
system.  Instead (if I understand correctly), it does something with
squashfs and nbd for the read-only root file system, plus an NFS
overlay for modified files.  If it's possible, I would actually love
to have the clients use NFS for the read-only base.  That way I could
make immediate changes to all clients at once without having to
regenerate the file system image and reboot the clients.

Just to be clear, in the current setup, the clients are resilient if
their network connection to the server goes away and then comes back.
The problem is when the server reboots, after which all the clients
have to be rebooted.  (Worse, they can't be remotely rebooted.)

Jim