[mythtvnz] Diskless Frontend

[Robin Gilks]

> I thought I would try doing a network boot on my frontends.
> Has anyone else set this up, any tips? Howto's etc so I don't take the
> long
> road?
>
> Regards
> Toby
>

Never done it any other way :-)

I'm running an Epia SP13000 as a combined frontend/backend as a diskless
system NFS mounted back onto my server box (an Athlon XP2700+ with 50G of
raid1 OS and 600G raid5 storage for videos, music, TV, pix etc).

Things start off by setting the BIOS of the Epia to DHCP an IP address and
grab pxegrub from the server. The kernel is tftp'd off the server and the
frontend root filesystem is NFS mounted. All the frontend code sits in a
directory on the server where I build it (being how the server is 3x as
quick). So the shopping list is...
dhcp server
pxegrub
tftp server
(and their associated config files)
exported nfs root directory
a kernel suitable for the frontend
basic OS
Mythtv stuff!

I'm running Gentoo so I just chrooted into a directory on the server and
built a new basic system there. As you can tell (i.e. Gentoo) I don't
choose the simple way :-)

The easiest way is to build the system on the frontend with a harddrive
then copy it to your server and switch to nfs mounting the root
filesystem, then get and boot the kernel from your server and then finally
PXE boot at which point you can unplug the harddrive. Simple stages where
its easy to unwind if it all goes tits up.


-- 
Robin Gilks