[mythtvnz] Mythfrontends using CF

[Robin Gilks]

Netiquette re-ordered...

>> Sam Banks wrote:
>>
>>> I tried that but the CF card didn't last long so I am back on IDE
>>> till I find a cost effective solution
>>>
>> Is a net boot off your backend an option?
>> I'd be interested in in a HOWTO for booting myth using this method.
>>
>
> I've been doing a diskless network boot from my Epia SP13000 combined
> front/backend right from when I first built it. Didn't even think of
> doing it any other way as I've got bags of diskspace on the nfs server
> machine.
>
> Just had to use network aware grub bootloader and keep an image of the
> media box on the big server (built using Gentoo in a chroot
> environment). Of course this all assumes that your BIOS can do a network
> boot...
>
> --
> Robin Gilks
>

> Cool, sounds like a cheaper way of doing it.
> Is it a pain when you want to change something?
> I tend to tweak a fair bit and I wouldn't want to go through the hassle
> of dumping a new image everytime I changed something on a frontend.
>
> Cheers
> Toby
>

Its not an image as in a single file but a complete directory on the
server. To do changes I just chroot into it on the server (no keyboard on
the media box) and do whatever - even updating, rebuilding etc I'm using
the 3GHz horsepower of the server rather than a 1.3GHz CPU of the media
box.

For mythtv, I run a master backend on the server (but no capture cards in
it - and a frontend for testing) so that after I've rebuilt an SVN update
I just 'mount --bind' the source directory into the media tree and do a
'make install' from the chroot environment.

As I'm using Gentoo, I use a 'mount --bind' of the portage tree to keep
that up-to-date as well (when I remember, about once a month!!)

Works well and is easy to tinker with

-- 
Robin Gilks