[mythtv-users] Questions on PXE booting a frontend

[Kevin Kuphal]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.


I haven't followed the entire thread, but another option is to use PXE to
load gPXE which can then mount an iSCSI volume as a boot drive.  This gets
around all the NFS issues you seem to be having and there are instructions
for some Linux versions like CentOS on the PXE site.  I'm helping a friend
do this with a Zotac and so far it seems to work very well.

Kevin
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