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

[Paul Gardiner]

On 26/11/2012 09:33, Per Jessen wrote:
> Paul Gardiner wrote:
>
>> My hopes are (anyone of which can be dropped if it simplifies things):
>>
>> 1) Not to have to add a disk to my Zotac ION.
>
> You can boot with root on NFS.
>
>> 2) To use opensuse because it's the linux I best know.
>
> I have servers on openSUSE that boot with root on NFS, it works.  I had
> to generate the initrd separately though.
>
>> 3) To do the initial install actually on the diskless machine,
>> so that I get as much automatic config as possible.
>
> I think that means hooking up a drive first, then installing, then
> copying the filesystem to your NFS-server.  I don't think I've ever
> tried installing straight onto NFS.
>
>> 4) To be able to switch off the diskless machine without
>> shutting down.
>
> So suspend?  Yes, I've been meaning to look into that too.
>
>> I have dhcp/pxe/tftp already set up on my opensuse server/backend
>> already, so it should be just a case of altering that.
>
> This is from one my pxe config files:
>
> append initrd=<your-initrd> root=/dev/nfs rw
> nfsroot=192.168.2.170:/var/pifs/stork1/root
> rootflags=hard,intr,v3,wsize=8192,rsize=8192
>
> You need NFS v3 because the suse initrd does not work with NFS v4 for
> booting.

At last, I've found time to try this, but I've run into a brick wall. I
installed a minimal opensuse 12.2 with mythtv, plus all that's needed
to build mythtv, all on a spare harddrive I had lying around. Works
great, but it's getting it to work via NFS that's troubling me.

I ran "mkinitrd -k vmlinuz -i initrdnfs -f nfs -D eth0 -B" and copied
the result plus the kernel to my server's tftp directory.

I already had tftp and pxe set up because of minimyth so that wasn't a
problem.

I copied all the installed files to a directory on my server
using rsync -ravzx. The x option avoids descending into mount points,
so things like proc and dev are empty directories.

I exported that with nfs options rw,no_all_squash,no_root_squash.

I put the following in the pxelinux.cfg file:

DEFAULT clunk-nfs

LABEL clunk-nfs
            KERNEL clunk/vmlinuz
            APPEND initrd=clunk/initrd init=/bin/systemd root=/dev/nfs 
rw nfsroot=10.0.0.5:/home/clunk rootflags=hard,intr,v3,wsize=8192,rsize=8192

[also tried init=/bin/init and leaving it out completely]

It tries very hard to work. The boot gets past the nfs mount stage and
gets some way through the init, but then it just stops. No shell prompt,
and I can't ssh in, so it's difficult to tell where it went wrong. 
Here's a photo of the screen:
http://intranet.glidos.net/~paul/boot-failure.jpg.

On the server side, I can see three
successful dhcp runs, with a tftp access between first and second, and
an nfs mount between second and third. I feel like it's close, but I'm
out of ideas what to try to get it the rest of the way.

Anything you can think off that I've missed?

Cheers,
	Paul.