Ok, this is a complicated one. Well, the question is. Kinda.

I'm building a newmedia center PC, and I've decided it doesn't need to have a 
harddrive in it (since all the media is on a media server). I was going to just 
boot it off a flashdrive, but then I decided, hey, why even have any physical 
media at all?

So I'm trying to do a diskless client netboot.

I did install the OS on a flashdrive, then create a netboot initrd image, copy 
those all to a PXE server, and actually got the thing to boot. It goes pretty 
far but then it hangs.

I'm not sure at what point it's hanging, since I can't login and look at logs. 
I /think/ it's definitely getting past the kernel boot part, and I think it's 
doing some of the init stuff. The last message I see on the screen (which 
CLEARS before this comes up) is that portmap has died. I thought that might be 
important because it's mounting root from nfs. However, it did used to get PAST 
that point and complain that I need -o nolock or statd running and THEN hang, 
but since I added that option it dosn't display that maessage.. so I think it's 
getting past the portmap thing. It is either not mounting root or it already 
has root mounted from before (I see an nfs authenticate right after the PXE 
boot).

I tried to get it to do remote syslog, but Ubuntu does some weird things with 
syslog. All the documents I can find online are for ancient versions of Ubuntu. 
I've tried this with Ubuntu Server 10.04, and with Mythbuntu based on Ubuntu 
Desktop 10.04 (I had to do a lot more hacking to get a desktop OS to netboot).

So I'm wondering if anyone has any diskless-client tips, or remote syslog tips 
on Ubuntu.


TIA!


-Yaron

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