LTSP

LTSP on Debian Lenny

Some differences between LTSP on Debian Lenny and upstream

• The clients still uses NFS to access files on the server, upstream has migrated to nbd. (this concerns /, not swap)
• To enable swap over nbd (which is another thing than / over nbd) on Debian Lenny, the intructions in /usr/share/doc/ltsp-server/swap are unclear, here is what I had to do: (using /home/ltsp-5 as —base for LTSP)
  • run nbd-server as a stand-alone-server (and not from inetd or rather xinetd that I use) configured like this

--- contents of /etc/nbd-server/config START
[generic]
# If you want to run everything as root rather than the nbd user, you
# may either say "root" in the two following lines, or remove them
# altogether. Do not remove the [generic] section, however.
        user = nbd
        group = nbd

# What follows are export definitions. You may create as much of them as
# you want, but the section header has to be unique.
[export]
        port = 9210
        exportname = /home/ltsp-5/swapfiles/swapfile.%s
--- contents of /etc/nbd-server/config STOP

• create the swapfiles-directory

  mkdir /home/ltsp-5/swapfiles
  

• create the swapfile, with %s replaced with the IP number of the client (241.131.119.123)

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/ltsp-5/swapfiles/swapfile.241.131.119.123 bs=1024k count=256
  

• let the user "nbd" own the file and directory

  chown -R nbd:nbd /home/ltsp-5/swapfiles
  

• add a rule to allow network traffic to the nbd-server

  echo "nbdswapd: ALL: keepalive" >> /etc/hosts.allow
  

• stop and start the nbd-server

  /etc/init.d/nbd-server stop
  /etc/init.d/nbd-server start
  

• edit /home/ltsp-5/i386/etc/lts.conf

   [00:48:54:6a:e2:d9]
       NBD_SWAP=Y
       SIZE=256
       NBD_PORT=9210
   

Using a non-x86 machine as LTSP server

The problem is that you cannot use the server to manage /opt/ltsp/i386 with chroot, since these binaries requires a x86 kernel. Solution:

• set a root password for the file-system (copy a /etc/shadow from a known working server)
• export the filesystem with write-access to one client - a client that you run yourself.

   /home/ltsp-5              241.131.119.123(rw,no_root_squash,sync,subtree_check)
   

• Set that client to boot to "shell" (or just press Ctrl-Alt-F1 when the booting process is finished).
• Log into the client as root.
• remount / using option rw

mount -o remount,rw /

IP specific files in LTSP

I wanted to migrate a terminal to another IP, what files did I have to change?

• /etc/exports (this client had a special rw export)
• /home/ltsp-5/swapfiles/swapfile.241.131.119.123 (named especially for the old IP).

Sound when alsa is not available

sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5

However, I found that alsa did work if only Plug'n Play was not used.

modprobe snd-sb16 isapnp=0

Still, pulseaudio often made the terminal freeze when there was non-audio related network traffic, so I reverted to using esd.

modprobe snd-pcm-oss
modprobe snd-mixer-oss
esd -public -tcp -noterminate &

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Last modified: oktober 17, 2019