[mythtv-users] How does the diskless setup work?

[Mark J. Small]

On June 7, 2005 08:49 am, gad at jetcom.org wrote:
> Quoting A JM <vbtalent at gmail.com>:
> > As far as hardware is concerned what are we talking about here? M/B,
> > ram, video, NIC? What's common for this type of setup?
>
> Pretty much any hardware you want. Obviously you need to have enough
> ram, since a swap partition isn't normally used. the NIC needs to
> support network booting. Most do now.  I'm running on a xp-3200 w/ 512
> mb. Works great as a HD fe.
>
> > Since this is run from memory changes to the Myth FE would be
> > temporary so I assume you modify the 'init script' to make your
> > modifications to Myth, themes, etc.?
>
> If you mount the root partition from an NFS mount, you can write to is
> as usual. There is no change to the system. Everything is configured
> the same. You can even build things on there.  Your mount points are
> jsut network mount points.
>

I ran a diskless frontend until recently.  It is really nice if when you get 
it working.  Unfortunately, when I upgraded the motherboard on the frontend, 
PXE just stopped working altogether.  Now I have a small hard drive that I 
boot from using syslinux.  I still have my root drive on nfs, and I spin down 
the rather loud local drive during boot.

Running diskless really is a great way to cut down the noise, and there is 
plenty of documentation out there on how to do it.  

Mark