[K12OSN] LTSP Setup question.

[David Trask]

Brad Bendily <bendily at gmail.com> on Thursday, October 14, 2004 at 6:46 PM
+0000 wrote:
>If only I would have kept reading.
>I found the 3rd question on this page and it pretty much got me there:
>http://k12ltsp.org/faq.html
>
>Now, I have my client booting, downloading the Kernel, and it loads X.
>Which is great! I didn't think it would have been this easy so far.
>
>The point I'm stuck at now is that X loads, but nothing else.
>Which is almost what i want. From here I would like to be able to load
>the Firefox browser only. Can someone point me in the right direction
>as to what file I need to edit to get Firefox loaded? Of course I would
>have
>to put firefox on the box, that I can do, but where should I put the load
>statement?


Brad,

I am now doing the same thing with regard to DHCP and a single NIC set up.
 I have Terrell Prude on this list to thank for pointing me in the right
direction.  Below is the text of his response to a post back in July.....

++++++++++++
Mark Cockrell wrote:


Hello all,
 I'm a total newbie (read idiot) when it comes to Linux, so don't be
afraid to treat me like one- I can handle it. I've got a Windows NT domain
running at the moment, and I want to deploy some LTSP clients throughout
the network. Since I want to have the clients spread out throughout the
network, the default K12LTSP setup in which the server acts as a router
for a lab situation isn't appropriate. Can someone tell me how configure
my server with just one NIC and my clients to get their IP address from my
existing MS DHCP server and then boot from the Linux server? I await great
wisdom.



Welcome, Mark, to the world of software freedom! You will not regret it,
for many reasons.

No "great" wisdom here, but as it turns out, this is exactly how I run all
of my K12LTSP deployments. In my case, I use a cisco router as the DHCP
server, and it works very, very well. I've not played with the Microsoft
DHCP server for netbooting, but I would advise you to consider going with
something considerably more standards-compliant...say, ISC DHCPD or a
cisco router. Windows DHCP servers are notoriously difficult to get
anything netbooting, including LTSP clients.

That said, here's how you set up the K12LTSP server. Make sure there's a
Gig-E card in your server. No, Fast Ethernet isn't good enough; trust us,
you *will* need Gigabit Ethernet. If your motherboard includes a Gig-E
integrated NIC, that is also supported by the Linux kernel (most are),
you're all set. Make sure that your NIC is *not* hooked up to the school
LAN at this point. It has to do with DHCP; just trust us and do it for
now; we'll get to that. Install K12LTSP, plugging in whatever IP address
you've assigned in your IP range; your Gig-E card will be seen as eth0.
Note that this presumes that you don't have any other NICs in the box, or
if you've got those integrated FastEthernet NICs, that you've disabled 'em
in the BIOS.

After you install K12LTSP (you still haven't hooked up to the LAN yet, be
patient), then you've got just a bit more work to do. Remember that
K12LTSP has a built-in DHCP server in it (ISC DHCPD, to be precise), and
we need to disable it or else you'll hose your entire LAN. Here we go.
Fire up a terminal session, su to root, and do this:

 [root takhisis microman]# /sbin/service dhcpd stop

This will stop the DHCP "daemon", which is the original name for what
Windows people call a "service". On any UNIX or UNIX-like system, they're
known as daemons. That's why, BTW, there's that "d" at the end of "dhcpd".

OK, great, we've stopped dhcpd, but that's only until the next reboot! Not
good. So, we'll tell GNU/Linux to not start it at boot-time, either! Heh
heh...

 [root takhisis microman]# chkconfig --level 2345 dhcpd off
 *NOW*, you can hook up your K12LTSP server to the LAN.

There is one last thing to do on the K12LTSP server. You've got to tweak
/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf to reflect your actual subnet. This is because
the default assumes 192.168.0.*/24. In my case, I run subnets of
10.0.0.0/9, specifically /20's, so 192.168.0.*/24 ain't gonna work for me.
You may also need to tweak /etc/hosts to change all the 192.168.0's to
whatever your IP subnet is. KEdit's "Find & Replace" function comes in
very handy here.

That ought to do it for the K12LTSP server.

At this point, you get to set your Windows DHCP scope to hand out the
proper parameters. Take a look through the archives of this list, because
I recall someone posting the specific tweaks that they had to do in
Windows to make it work. Of course, you *could* simply switch from using
the Windows DHCP service to the ISC DHCPD built into K12LTSP! :-)
Seriously, that might be a better solution, since you'll be running a
single-NIC K12LTSP server, thus everyone on the LAN can see that server.

Hope this helps,

--TP

+++++++++++++++

David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Coordinator
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us
(207)923-3100