[mythtv-users] Best options/howto for diskless frontends

Ross Boylan RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org
Tue Nov 27 17:54:55 UTC 2012


On Mon, 2012-11-26 at 18:44 +0000, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Ross Boylan wrote:
> 
> >I generated the initial installation using debootstrap. An issue for me,
> >as it sounds as if it is for you, is that my server had a different
> >hardware type than the FE.
> 
> I'm fairly certain debootstrap can deal with that - I know it can 
> install a different distro than the one that's running. Having said 
> that, it's a long time since I used it.
> 
> Ah yes, just checked the man page and it does support installing a 
> foreign arch.
I tried it and could not get it to work.  The idea appears to be that
you will lay the groundwork in one architecture and then boot into the
target and finish.  The result of the first step was non-bootable; it
didn't have anything at all in boot.  Perhaps if I'd installed a kernel
I'd have got further (!), but even then the initrd is created in the
post install step, and the first stage debootstrap only unpacks packages
without setting them up.  It can't set them up because that would
require running the programs, which only work on the foreign
architecture.

I tried a lot of other things that didn't work, such as running the
debian installer off NFS.

This doesn't mean the other  approaches couldn't work; it does mean how
to do it is not well documented.

For example, with judicious use of pre-seeding it might be possible to
ge tthe installer to work.

Ross
> 



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