Until recently i have been running a single KM box. I decided to make a backend with a PVR-150 in my basement and have a small silent frontend with a PVR350 in the living room. At the same time the backend could serve as a samba server with shares of ordinary data and a music share for my Sonos system. I have more than 400 Gigs of music, pictures, videos and data on the backend. KM really serves our needs greatly - thanks Cecil and all. Frontend accesses videos etc via a NFS share on the backend. I run R5C7 on both FE and BE.

Now it's time to make the frontend silent = no ordinary noisy disk. I have tried the wiki posting about making the diskless frontend with partial success. Everything worked neat except that everytime i switched the frontend to run diskless of the backend it defaulted pvr350 tv-out to NTSC standard. As i am in Pal area this isn't usable. So until now the frontend have been running with it's own disk accessing mysql and video on the backend. I have not been able to make the FE diskless and run Pal at the same time.

As a worKaround i thought about making the frontend boot on a CF card as a disk. Since CF cards only can live through a limitied number of writes I have direct all diskwrites to the BE

I would turn of swap (FE has 512 Megs ram) and make /var to a NFS dir on the BE.

I so far have had success in turning of swap of by commenting out the swap partition in /etc/fstab and make a line in the end of /etc/init.d with swapoff -a. Everything keeps on working as expected. So far so good.

When I try to redirect /var to an NFS volume on the BE the FE starts ok but during boot I get an error stating "lockd: failed to monitor ip_of_backend" severeal times. After about 2 minutes of pause the FE goes on booting and gives the running lines as expected when it tries to switch output to the PVR-350 tv-out. The problem is that nothing is showing on the tv.

On the BE i can se that the dirs' for ../var/autofs and ../var/run gets created by the FE - but no more dirs - so I don't have log to search for error messages.

Other dir's from the FE is working perfectly ok as nfs dir's from the BE. I have remembered to do my exports etc....

I have searched the forums and the net to lookup how to redirect /var and can't se why it shouldn't be possible to have it on a NFS volume.

If I switch off the nfs redirection of /var on the FE everything is back to normal and the PVR-350 tv-out functions again.

Is there some mystery trick in redirecting /var compared to other directories that i have missed?
/JK