[mythtv-users] Diskless

Peter Bowyer peter at bowyer.org
Tue Jan 30 18:01:00 UTC 2007


On 30/01/07, Rich West <Rich.West at wesmo.com> 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?  Especially since swap
> would also be on an NFS mounted volume...
>
> 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 use the MiniMyth distro (www.linpvr.org) on an EPIA SP13000 as my
FE. It runs diskless, boots via PXE, and has enough RAM not to need
swap (1GB). There's a configuration option to run the root fs over
NFS, but I preferred to add RAM.

Performance over wired ethernet is just fine - although I don't do HD.
My SD streaming tops out at under 10Mbit/s, so there's no problem with
100Mbit/s ethernet any more than there would be with a standard
disk-based FE.

If you're already up to speed with PXE, tftp, syslinux etc then you're
pretty much good to go - MiniMyth has all the hard work done for you.
Of course the great thing about diskless is that it's so easy to try
out....

Peter
-- 
Peter Bowyer
Email: peter at bowyer.org


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