Building a Diskless MythTV Frontend with Mythbuntu 10.04 - Lucid Lynx - Part 1

I just upgraded to Mythbuntu 10.04 which was released just a few days back on April 29th.  Since I was already running Mythbuntu 9.10 on my MythTV backend server I was able to upgrade it to Lucid using the well documented and fairly simple steps on the ubuntu.com site:

$ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

After upgrading the backend server I decided to finally figure out why my diskless frontend server wasn't working.  After a day of investigating it turned out to be a faulty stick of memory.  With that replaced, I needed to configure a diskless frontend on the MythTV backend server so I could use PXE to boot into a frontend without having to worry about anything else.  Since Mythbuntu hasn't had a graphical control panel to create a diskless frontend since Karmic, this blog post documents everything I had to do to get my diskless frontend up and running.  Some of the setup already existed but I'm documenting it here for future use.

Requirements for PXE Booting

PXE is a way for computers to boot up using resources found on the network.  On some computers you have to press F12 or some other key to get them to PXE boot but on all computers that have network cards that support PXE you should be able to set the first boot option in the BIOS to something like "Network" to allow your computer to PXE boot.

During a PXE boot a network card will perform the following tasks without any intervention from any OS stored anywhere on the computer:

1. automatically obtain an IP address,
2. automatically obtain a boot kernel and initial ramdisk, and
3. boot up the computer using that kernel and initial ramdisk 

After booting up the kernel using the initial ramdisk in step 3, the OS can either use a built-in hard drive or the computer's RAM as a root disk or it can NFS mount a volume from a remote server and use it as a root disk.  The NFS scenario is most common for computers that PXE boot and is the one I use.

For a computer to be able to automatically obtain an IP address you need a DHCP server in your network.  However, this DHCP server has to be configured so it can inform the PXE booting computer where the kernel and initial ramdisk files are located.  The kernel and initial ramdisk files are hosted on a TFTP server.  Finally the NFS mounted root disk needs an NFS server which will export the directory of files that will become the root directory of a diskless MythTV frontend.

In my home network I have a separate DHCP server hosted on a Linux machine that used to be my main Linux server.  Now it just serves DHCP until I can move that functionality into my Cisco router.  The other two pieces of the puzzle i.e. the TFTP server and the NFS server are handled by the Mythbuntu backend server and are closely tied to each other.  However, there is no reason why they can't be split up onto their own servers.

The next post will focus on the steps needed to build a diskless image using the Linux Terminal Server Project's utilities.  The post after that will focus on configuring the individual servers needed to put it all together.  These three posts should serve as a more or less complete guide to setting up a diskless Mythbuntu frontend.