[mythtv-users] Questions on PXE booting a frontend

[Jim Stichnoth]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 4:37 AM, Jelte Veldstra<jelte.veldstra at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> > 2. Can the DHCP service in a home router and a Linux DHCP/PXE server
>> > coexist on the same network?  I would prefer the home router to handle
>> > most DHCP requests and the Linux server to handle just the PXE-related
>> > requests for this frontend, so that e.g. my wife doesn't lose DHCP for
>> > her laptop computer when the Linux server is down.
>>
>
> Even though with bad configuration they can cause a lot of confusion and
> disruption it can be done safely. My router is handing out IPs using dhcp,
> but cannot parse the PXE options. On my MythTV backend I have setup a dhcp
> server that does not assign IPs except for a list of mac addresses it knows.

I'm glad to hear that at least a couple of people have got this
working.  I'll pursue that after I get past the NFS root problems that
I'm currently having.

My first problem in that area was that I needed to point mkinitrd at
the target /etc/fstab with the NFS-mounted root.  After I figured that
out, mkinitrd automatically pulled in the required nfs and networking
modules and I didn't to use any other --with or --preload options.
Then I had to deal with the fact that for some reason NetworkManager
has assigned my only network interface as eth1 but the modified bootup
used eth0.  (I worked around this by hand-modifying the initrd image
to change all the eth1 strings to eth0, but if someone can tell me how
to get NetworkManager to permanently change it back to eth0, I'd be
much happier.)  The final problem I encountered before giving up for
the night is that the "mount" command built into nash doesn't support
NFS, so I guess I need to package up and use mount.nfs in the initrd
script.

Jim