[Milhouse]

Yup. Definitely useful. I've got one Pi booting Raspbian from my NFS server, and was trying to follow the OpenElec instructions ( http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=...Boot_-_NFS ) which require setting up a tftp server (and possibly nfs-kernel-server, which is a bit tricky when you're booting from a commercial NAS. Although I'm also insufficiently knowledgeable to know whether it's different from normal NFS, or just a specialised subsection.)

And then, luckily, I found your instructions, which are much, much simpler (and are analagous to the Raspbian configuration). You've turned much head-scratching and confusion into a five minute job.

Glad I've been of help!

The OpenELEC wiki instructions apply to a regular PC, and are liable to confuse anyone coming at the problem with a Raspberry Pi. The Pi is so much easier to get going than a PC - none of this PXE/tftp booting nonsense!

I briefly looked at the Raspbian NFS boot instructions but rapidly lost interest when it started mentioning loopback devices etc., but realise it's probably overcomplicating matters and a straight copy of the ext4 partition to a folder on the NAS should be sufficient. Though to be honest I'm quite happy with my Raspbian headless server running from it's fast 32GB SD card, particularly as it's perfectly stable and suffers no SD corruption despite being overclocked to the max. Plus, the whopping £20 I laid out on the SD card is a sunk cost!

OpenELEC on the other hand is far more amenable to booting from NFS (as it loads entirely into RAM etc.) and also because, lets be honest, it's pretty keen on munching SD cards at every opportunity so avoiding writes to the SD card when at all possible seems like the best option. If necessary I'll even disable auto-updates (hopefully auto-update will support NFS booting for RC1 - I've offered a patch to the OE developers).

While testing OpenELEC Beta 6 I've had several system hangs that I know with absolute certainty would have required a full re-format of the ext4 SD partition, but when booting from NFS the system has come back up without a hitch.

I've also got into a situation where I had a decent Movie library set up, then spent several hours scraping a music library (scraping Music is a very slow process) only to find it impossible to replace specific artwork due to dumb caching rules etc. (just try replacing a cover.jpg thumb with a newer, better, version and watch XBMC ignore the new content - frustrating!) The solution, however, was easy - just restore the known-good backup I took prior to initiating the Music scan, and kick off another Music scan, this time with the new artwork in place on the NAS.

To be honest, I'd move the "rpi#n" element one step up the path, so you've got "../rpi#1/System" and "../rpi#1/Storage" immediately next to each other, rather than grouping all the Systems together, and the Storages together. But to each, their own

Yeah, that could work, it's certainly a change I might consider myself!