[LINUX] HOW-TO create a XBMC server for diskless PXE network booting clients

ttabbal Wrote:dushmaniac: Thanks for the nice package. It worked very well for me on an Ubuntu Natty host. Just used lucid for the bootable image. Looking forward to seeing what you do with OpenELEC. I like the idea of just downloading the kernel/image rather than using debootstrap. Now I've got to configure the thing....

Care to share how you installed it on a Natty host?

how is work going with the openelec version? sounds interesting

didn't have time to do it yet.
I might do it in the one of the next few weeks, since I need something similar for another project

Hi Dushmaniac!

I managed to install the system, and working perfect... I'd like to interesting, possible to "disable" the overlay feature? Because i'd like a "master" pc in my network, and all other pc should boot "clean" every restart...

...or i should solve it with a script?

Thanks your answer, and have a good developing!

Pankoka

I'm not sure if people are still using this, but I recently needed to update Ubuntu from Lucid for Alsa drivers. So, I updated the scripts to work for a Natty chroot.

Just replace the PPA in the directions with "ppa:travis-tabbal/xbmc-diskless" to test it out, then enter "natty" as the distro to use. I also used the Team-XBMC PPA as a source, so there is a check for that to switch to using the maverick version as the PPA hasn't been updated for natty yet.

If you still have the existing PPA installed, you can remove it from /etc/apt/sources.list.d, add mine with apt-add-repository, then do an apt-get update to fix it up.

NOTE: This should be considered BETA at best. I have not had time to test booting on hardware yet, just in Virtualbox, which the image doesn't seem to have X drivers for. So I can't verify that XBMC loads properly. The basics are all there though. If it works, I expect it will get merged into the main repo at some point. The source is included, of course. Dushmaniac just seems busy on other stuff so I did the updates. He is welcome to incorporate my changes if he chooses to. I will update here when I've had time to do more testing. I just wanted to put it out there for review and further testing. I would like to hear about how it works for people just generating the images, if you don't want to try booting anything on it. You can test on existing systems by changing the target path in the config file (/etc/default/xbmc-diskless-server.conf). Change the paths so you don't disrupt any existing setup. Or try it in a Virtualbox VM, if you want to help test.

UPDATE: Tested on hardware. XBMC loads properly. Both systems are NVidia based. However, I seem to lack the SMB utilities, so connecting to Windows/Samba shares is a pain. I'm adding them to the next version. Added them to the image and re-packed/installed, however, still getting "Error 2" when browsing for an SMB share. Not sure what's up there, they are available and can be mounted just fine. I used init.rc to mount them. Also, bootsplash isn't working... the dpkg installs, but it never shows up.. probably some config file needs to be updated.

Hi,

On my XBMC install, I usually mount my media file through a NFS share directly on the XBMC pc.

After moving to the diskless XBMC I tried to add the same mount point to the XBMC pc as before. Can someone tell me the proper way to add extra mount point on a PXE client?

I tried adding the mount command to the rc.local script without any success. I aslo tried add a fstab file in the provisioning folder. With these two methods I was able to see the change on the PXE pc but the NFS share was never mounted.
In order word, if run the rc.local script manually, it will mount the nfs share and if I do a "mount -a" the nfs share is also mounted from the fstab.

Can anyone give me a hint on how to do that?

Thank you!

I know it isn't really useful, but I did the same thing with no problems. My NFS share mounts on boot perfectly.

Can you "cat /etc/fstab" from within the PXE boot and confirm your NFS share is listed?

francoisst Wrote:Hi,

On my XBMC install, I usually mount my media file through a NFS share directly on the XBMC pc.

After moving to the diskless XBMC I tried to add the same mount point to the XBMC pc as before. Can someone tell me the proper way to add extra mount point on a PXE client?

I tried adding the mount command to the rc.local script without any success. I aslo tried add a fstab file in the provisioning folder. With these two methods I was able to see the change on the PXE pc but the NFS share was never mounted.
In order word, if run the rc.local script manually, it will mount the nfs share and if I do a "mount -a" the nfs share is also mounted from the fstab.

Can anyone give me a hint on how to do that?

Thank you!

This is what I see on the client in the fstab:



I also made sure that the folder where present on the client...

francoisst Wrote:This is what I see on the client in the fstab:

Code:

cat fstab

# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM
nfs.maison:/mnt/storage/partage /mnt/storage/partage nfs nfsvers=3,rw 0 0
nfs.maison:/mnt/storage/download /mnt/storage/download nfs nfsvers=3,rw 0 0

I also made sure that the folder where present on the client...

it seems to be an issue with mount-all. Adding the "nolock" option fixed everything
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sourc...bug/547139

nice to see that people are still using this

pankoka Wrote:I'd like to interesting, possible to "disable" the overlay feature? Because i'd like a "master" pc in my network, and all other pc should boot "clean" every restart...

not without changing the code, sorry. it's hardcoded.

as you might have noticed, I didn't have time to spend on this little project lately. however, the plan to create an openelec based version is still there. it's just delayed a bit I tweaked openelec's initramfs so it can boot from the net a while ago and it has already been merged by sraue. so the only thing that's still missing are the changes in the setup script that are needed to take/build an openelec image instead of taking a mini ubuntu.