[mythtv-users] Has anyone configured a "semi"-diskless frontend?

[Brad Templeton]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 07:44:03PM -0400, Mark J. Small wrote:
> On January 4, 2005 06:58 pm, stan wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 05:35:21PM -0500, john roberts wrote:
> > > I've thought about doing this also.  I'm wondering why you wouldn't want
> > > to go diskless.  Why not boot of the net?
> > >
> > > Is it the boot-up time you're concerned about?
> >
> > Have you made a diksless frontend work? If os, have you any pointers to a
> > good HOWTO?
> 
> My diskless frontend is working very nicely.  I boot using PXE, I found this 
> in my bookmarks, though I can't remember how useful it was:
> 
> http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html
> 
> I did have to update the firmware on my Intel Pro 100 before it would work 
> properly.
> 
> My biggest boot-up time problem is that the motherboard spends a long time 
> wondering why there is no keyboard.  It eventually gives me the no keyboard 
> error and continues on its merry way, but it takes a while.  


Another option you can consider, if you have a bios that is new enough
to boot from a USB device, is you could put together a basic Myth system
on one of those tiny USB flash drives.   Certainly doable on a 1gb
drive -- in which case you could not use NFS at all because you could
stream the Myth protocol if you use the CVS version without the remote
frontend file handle bug, but you could probably fit easily enough in
smaller ones.  You might want to put some things like /tmp and parts of
/var into a ramdisk to avoid constant writing to the flash, which you
want to avoid.

You could also do boot and root from a much smaller flash card or drive
(for $16 you can get an IDE flash adapter that in theory means you don't
even need a new bios) and then mount the rest of your filesystems over
NFS, including your video spool.

What that gets you is something fast, silent and local with no seek times
when it comes to running the local programs.  No seek times can mean a
pretty fast boot and other operations.   Considering how cheap a 256mb flash
card is today...   Though you want one with a good read speed, or on USB
one that is usb 2.0.   You have an extra "spindle" so that read/writes
to your main programs don't take the seek arm away from your video stream.

But I haven't tried this to see what you really get.   Unlike the noisy
boot hard drive, you don't need to spin it down.  

There is also CD boot, but then you have to swap the boot CD in the drive
when you want to put DVDs and CDs in there.

You may find it easier to get pxe boot operating and just be all network.