[8.04] Testing Diskless Frontends?

[venom986]

I have been setting up a primary backend using Mythbuntu 8.04 Alpha2. I have it more or less working with minimal effort (minus an issue I'm having where my raid arrays don't keep their config across reboots :(). Kudos on an alpha that is already more stable than the last mythtv wrapper distro I tried.

Now, my next step is to try getting a diskless secondary frontend/backend up and running. I see there are now mythbuntu-diskless-server packages in synaptic. I tried quickly installing the standalone and its dependencies but got lots of errors from dhcp3 trying to start up and things don't seem to be at the point of working out of the box.

if someone can direct me to some documentation to kickstart my attempts, i'd be happy to try this out and provide feedback.

[superm1]

Hold off a few days. There is a newer version on its way up, and then lots of documentation to follow it (hopefully)

[venom986]

Sounds good.

Quick question, is this intended mainly for true thin clients, or does it facilitate "fat" clients too?

Also, do you have the trac id number on hand so i can keep an eye out?

[laga]

Check this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=711079

[venom986]

Great news.

for the time being I have installed to a usb stick ($30 for 4GB, couldn't pass that up) as I needed to get things up and running quickly. When I get another good chunk of time I will definately test out the diskless packages for you; the I/O throughput on usb sticks makes me puke!

[venom986]

just read through your documentation. it sounds pretty straightforward. I may just go ahead with trying it out early next week if I get the time.

I'd still like to know, is it a true thin client, or a fat diskless client? I have one ofmy tuner cards in my htpc and the other in my primary mythbuntu backend and need to keep it that way, plus ihave a decent amount of ram and cpu power in the htpc and would like to make use of it for job queues.

[laga]

It's a true fat client. Everything is running locally on the client.

I assume you're using NFS to store recordings on the slave backend? That's fine.
It's certainly possible to save them directly to the overlay directory, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea (eg how will aufs react to that?).

I'll clarify the thin client VS fat client issue in my thread.

[venom986]

i'll keep the chattering to this thread and just give well formatted feedback in your thread.

I've got the client image building atm, couldn't wait to try things.

With the usb stick setup, yes I'm mounting an NFS share for the diskless client. although, i just noticed in mythweb that it is showing my storage groups multiple times (once for the server, once for the client). I wonder if I should have entered an nfs share directly as the directories for the storage groups on the client, rather than mounting the nfs share to a local mount point and entering that in the client's mythtv setup?