[mythtv-users] Mythbuntu-diskless - can a client survive a server reboot?

Ronald Frazier ron at ronfrazier.net
Wed Jan 26 15:56:30 UTC 2011


On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Jacob Mansfield <cyberjacob at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the OP's problem is that the frontend essentially looses it's
> connection to it's hard-drive but I see how/where your suggestion
> would help.

The idea is that you setup a ram disk, copy all the required files
from the NFS drive, and then switch over to running off of the ram
disk. At this point, if the network connection goes away (like if the
NFS server is powered down), your network would disappear but the
files needed to operate would be stored locally. Obviously, you don't
copy over EVERY file (that would take way too long every reboot and
consume a lot of memory) so you just copy over files that are
essential for the OS to run...just enough so that it doesn't hang, so
that it can continue to run scripts, attempt to re-establish a new
connection, etc.

I tried doing this a few years ago. In the older kernels, the
forcedeth driver for the nvidia nforce system had a bug that would not
allow it to survive a suspend-to-ram, so you had to unload the network
driver before suspending. With a netboot system, I'm sure you can
imagine the result of taking your network connection offline (same as
the OP's problem). My first attempt was to try and figure out how to
do the ramdisk approach, but I could never get it working. After about
a week without success, I gave up, bought some $2 PCI network cards
off ebay, and that solved the problem until the driver was fixed in a
newer kernel.

-- 
Ron


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