feedback from a recent installation

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

just installed Edubuntu Dapper in the past few weeks.  Braodly speaking,
I'm pretty happy so far, thanks for all the work.  I thought I would air an
issue we went through in case anyone else comes across it and give a little
feedback.  

We changed the IP address of the ltsp server after installation.  This
silently broke all of the thin client logins :-(  Because there is no
logging to the ltsp server and because ldm doesn't give an error, this was
a little awkward to track down.

ldm's ssh session requires verification of the ltsp server's ssh host key
(which is nice).  However, the entry in the LTSP:/etc/ssh/known_hosts is
placed against the ip address of the server.  Therefore, if you change the
server ip address, you break your thin clients logins.

The answer as it turns out is at the bottom of this page:

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToCookEdubuntu/Chapters/LTSPManagement

I admit that I missed the issue in the Cookbook at the time and I had to go
and debug the thin clients.  It took me a bit of time to realise that I
needed an account on the LTSP client for that.  Having understood the
problem, I'm inclined to think that a nicer solution would be to use a name
in the /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ssh/known_hosts and either add the entry to
/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/hosts or possibly run a basic dns server (eg dnsmasq) on
the thin client server but in both cases some file needs changing so I
guess it's really just moving the problem.

My real problem was the fact that ldm just failed silently.  There are many
possible reasons for a login to fail and an ssh key is not an obvious one
(to me anyway).  If ldm fails, I think it should ideally print the error
(eg from ssh) to the text console or preferably a status bar on the X
screen.  I appreciate that this is probably not trivial to do.

On debian-edu, LTSP clients use syslogd to log back to a file on the
server.  Generally speaking, this would seem a lot more convenient for
monitoring and debugging to me.

Anyway, these are small things.  Generally speaking I really I like
edubuntu.

Gavin