Presentation and LTSP support request

[Daniel J. Summers]

Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> 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.
>   
So the wireless router becomes 192.168.0.1, and you tell the Edubuntu 
server (ES) to use that as the gateway?  Interesting...  Would the 
wireless connections still work - i.e., they'll connect through the 
router, but get their Internet access through the server (which would 
make the ES a proxy server)?  Or, does the DHCP server on the ES tell 
them to go straight to 192.168.0.1 for Internet stuff?  I'd really be 
interested in this setup for my house - we're going to start 
home-schooling in the near future, and I'd like to have ES running to 
take advantage of it's features.  :)  I still have a switch on order for 
the school I'm setting up, because they only have 3 ports in their 
wireless router, and they're all full.

I'd really be interested in that proxy server setup for the school I'm 
setting up, though - I'm sure they don't want wide-open Internet access 
in their classrooms.  (And, I understand that with thin clients, most of 
those restrictions would be placed on the user.)

> 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.  
>   
That's not quite what I was suggesting - but that's an interesting way 
to do it that I hadn't thought of.  :)  Thanks for that!


Daniel