[mythtv-users] Diskless

Jarod Wilson lists at wilsonet.com
Tue Jan 30 18:00:06 UTC 2007


Rich West wrote:
> I came across the diskless how-to on the Wiki and, while I have the
> entire infrastructure in place (I build both windows and Linux boxes via
> PXE booting), I immediately thought "hey, that would definitely be QUIET".
> 
> However, the question that goes unanswered in the wiki is about
> performance.  Since the entire system is loading and running off of the
> network (I've got cat-5 wired) *and* mythtv is also going over that same
> network, doesn't that beat up on the performance?

Not really. Any 100Mbps switched network shouldn't have a problem 
keeping up.

> Especially since swap
> would also be on an NFS mounted volume...

Probably a non-issue, but you can always buy more RAM. My frontend box 
rarely if ever touches swap.

> I'd be interested to hear about people's experiences with MythTV and a
> diskless frontend to see if it would be a viable configuration or if it
> is just a pipe dream..

I did a diskless epia at one point in the past. Worked fine for the most 
part (for SDTV-only, of course). I found it more hassle than it was 
worth though, especially since I had a spare laptop hard drive sitting 
around, which makes for just about as quiet a system, and easier to 
update (now, if you had multiple diskless frontends, a single shared nfs 
image would start to be less hassle to keep in sync than upgrading 
multiple hard drive installs).

--jarod


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