knoppmyth.net

red321 · Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 116 Location: UK

I have added my NFSroot approach to the Diskless frontend "How to" over at the Wiki.

Works perfectly for me Smile

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=DisklessFrontend

Greg Frost · Posted: Sat May 20, 2006 3:12 pm Post subject:

I ran out of inodes on my /myth partition when I attempted to extract the tarball of the frontend into /myth/terminal_server/nfsroot.
How did you get around this?
From my backend:

red321 · Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 116 Location: UK

Hmm,

Sorry Greg, not a problem I ran into, as I have upgraded so many times that my machine isn't a "clean install". I have moved /myth/tv off onto another physical disk, and my /myth partition has plenty of inodes to spare. Therefore didnt even see this one coming Sad

Greg Frost · Posted: Sun May 21, 2006 12:38 am Post subject:

red321 · Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 116 Location: UK

Good point !
I'll fix the Wiki

I tried symlinking /myth/terminal_services/nfsroot/usr to /usr. and exporting /usr. It didnt work for me because my backend installs and frontends are sufficiently diffrent now for ther eto be symlinks between /usr and other parts of the backend filesystem, which dont apear on the frontend filesystem. Bit of a managment nightmare to intertwine 2 file systems Smile

Greg Frost · Posted: Sun May 21, 2006 1:02 am Post subject:

My tftp on the frontend timed out. When I went back to check /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default on the backend, I found it wasn't there! On closer inspection it appears that /tftpboot was a symlink to /tmp/tftpboot, so rebooting the backend blew away the configuration. I ran prep-ts again and this time removed the tftpboot symlink and moved /tmp/tftpboot to /tftpboot.

I'll reconfigure and let you know how I get on.

I'm a little confused about this:

Greg Frost · Posted: Sun May 21, 2006 1:17 am Post subject:

Well, I still get a TFTP open timeout. You say tftp should be taken care of by inetd. Looking at /etc/inetd.conf, there is a line for tftpd that is commented out.

Greg Frost · Posted: Sun May 21, 2006 1:49 am Post subject:

Ok, I got past that problem. I needed to edit /etc/inetd.conf and replace

red321 · Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 116 Location: UK

Shows why good How-tos are hard to find Smile

I ran this on my own main system, then ran a clean install on another machine, but only as a autoupdate. This leaves /myth on the root partition if you dont allready have one.

Thats why I didnt spot the inodes gotcha.

Not sure why you are seeing a kernel panic.

If you have got that far , then I guess:

DHCP, PXE, TFTP are all working. You should be seeing a NFS access request in your syslog, unless:

1) You dont have nfs-kernel-server running
2) You are not exporting the root filesystem.
3) your default config is wrong.

Cant think of anything else.

Oh yes Ican. Did you read the "dont run knoppix-terminalserver" ever again, ever, I really mean it bit Very Happy

You might be running with th eoriginal vmlinuz file, rather than the new shiny one that you built with NFSroot support. The big problem her eis that as soon as you run Terminalservices it happily undoes all your good work. In fact I just di that myself while checking out one of your questions Sad

mgrassi99 · Joined: 27 Jan 2004 Posts: 68

GREAT howto; I had already been playing around with TFTP and LTSP and other diskless solutions without success, and this got me over the hump. Smile

One hiccup I encountered using the NFSroot method: my kernel loaded, and the setup scripts started to execute, but I got loads of:

Greg Frost · Posted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 11:03 pm Post subject:

I had a go at getting this going again. Because of my inode problem on the /myth partition, I just put the NFS root on the root partition of the backend. That worked fine. I then ran into the problem that mgrassi99 had. Thanks for posting a solution. That worked a treat for me.

Now I'm trying to work out how to get the frontend to mount the backend's /usr directory so that I dont need a whole extra copy of it (its 1.2G which takes a fair chunk out of the root partition).

Greg Frost · Posted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 11:57 pm Post subject:

So here's what I did:
In the nfs root: rename usr to usr2 so it will not be used. Create an empty usr directory to be used as a mount point.
In /etc/exports on the backend, add this:

red321 · Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 116 Location: UK

Greg,

Quick fix would be to edit ~/.fluxbox/apps

change out the knoppmyth-run entry (cant rememner the exact syntax)

change it to just mythfrontend

Then your login willl not be reqested, as that is due to the knoppmyth-run script detecting ( or not detecting) flags that it expects set.

Greg Frost · Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 7:40 pm Post subject:

Thanks, but I just changed the startup numbers for mountall and mountnfs in /etc/rcS.d so that they were before the knoppmyth script that checks for tuners and it all worked beautifully.

sinspot1 · Joined: 22 Dec 2005 Posts: 198

I had a question...... I am setting up the disklessfe and was wondering to all of the FE have to use the same image or could I have different ones. For example that one FE is set to use the digital out and another is using the analog outs or one is using the S-VIDEO and the other is using the DVI out. You see what I mean.

Thanks
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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!