On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 12:38 +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 19:40:15 +0800, William Kenworthy wrote: > > > > If it's diskless, where are /tmp and /var/tmp mounted? If they use > > > tmpfs the "memory" usage is understandable. If they use NFS the > > > emerges must be unbearably slow. > > > For normal usage, they are in tmpfs along with portage but I mount them > > over nfs for larger packages as memory is too constrained (just comment > > out the lines in fstab) - most packages take much less than a hundred mb > > or so for the storage unless its glibc or the like. After a reboot they > > are using no space (of course) and it just takes a sync to replace > > portage and I use http-replicator on the network so distfiles are not a > > problem. > > So root is on another (more powerful?) machine and mounted over NFS? Why > not chroot into the root on the host machine and run the emerge there? > > The root is on a core2 duo, while the mythbackend and myth NFS mounts are on an old athlon. I did try and build the system there in a chroot but its a 32 bit install and I went with 64bit for the atom. Result was it didnt work - cant remember the details (was nearly a year ago :) but some packages were ok, others not - I was expecting it to work and had planned on managing upgrades via chroot. 64 bit was an experiment to see if it was worth migrating the rest of the systems over and this has been the only 32/64 hiccup so far but a mythtv frontend is not overly complex.
The initial install was then done using gentoo on an 8G usb stick plugged into the machine and everything nfs mounted or on the usb stick. Worked a treat! For the new 4G machine I just copied it to a new directory and set it to PXE boot the new copy. The 3G machine is a Zotac ION N330 atom, while the 4G one is a Jetway ION-TOP N330 "bare bones" system - very similar hardware except for the 3G/4G memory difference. Only grief is getting the odd-ball CIR working on the ION-TOP. BillK
