Presentation and LTSP support request

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sun, 05 Nov 2006, Daniel J. Summers wrote:

> > 2/ In my AMD I have only one network card. Edubuntu 6.10 claims to run
> > Out-of-the-box on a server with two cards. Is this mandatory ? I don't
> > want to add a card in my AMD if not needed.
> >   
> I believe that it is required.  The problem comes in with DHCP - your 
> Linksys router likely provides a DHCP server, and your AMD box gets its 
> IP address from that router.  To boot, the LTSP clients need to obtain a 
> DHCP lease from the LTSP box - in your current configuration, though, 
> they would get their address from the wireless router.  Also, your AMD 
> box cannot be a DHCP server and a DHCP client across the same physical 
> connection.  With two network cards, one is the server interface (to 
> handle connections to the thin clients), and one is a client interface 
> (allowing access to the Internet connection for all connected devices).

You can certainly run with a single network card (dealing with two network
cards is a recently added feature not a requirement).  However, the above
DHCP problem can be solved by simply disabling the dhcp server on the
router -- which is fairly simple to do.  I'd suggest setting it a static ip
of 192.168.0.1 and letting your other machines inhabit the remaining space.

This is exactly what our network does.

> > 3/ I don't find on the web site, neither on the wiki, neither in the
> > archives of the mailing lists what I have to do to make it running.

Enabling the thin client stuff is detailed on this page (toward the
bottom):

http://www.edubuntu.org/GettingStarted

It's unclear from the map whether the thin clients have a wired route to
the AMD machine or not.  If they do, it should all just work.  If they are
wireless devices, it could be a little more complex.  As far as I'm aware,
the thin clients must have wired network cards with PXE support to boot
from the server. Wireless cards won't do PXE. 

One solution to this as Dan described is to plug the thin client network
card into a wireless access point -- so the link is over wireless but you
still have a PXE capable network card.  

The thin client server probably can be connected over a wireless card,
though it is probably not a great idea to have such a core component
connected via wireless with shared bandwidth, etc.

Gavin