Thin client configuration problems

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, DB Clinton wrote:

> Because I was a bit nervous with partitioning my hard drive (there's
> WinXP running there too), I loaded the desktop version of Edubuntu
> (7.1.0)  through Wubi (whose alpha version didn't support the server
> edition). Configuration has been, shall we say, a challenge.

If you get a chance some time you might explore the standard installer
which allows you to resize partitions.  Of course, you're right to be
cautious.  :-)

> has even got to the poing of being successfully assigned an IP address.

Sounds like your DHCP isn't working.  If you run the command:
	ps aux |grep dhcp

you should get a line something like:

dhcpd    26556  0.0  0.1   2920   612 ?        Ss   Dec03   0:00 /usr/sbin/dhcpd3 -q eth0 -pf /var/run/dhcp3-server/dhcpd.pid -cf /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf

If not, your dhcp server isn't running.

> I think there's something wrong with my NIC configuration. At present, both
> eth0 (attached to my DSL modem) and eth1 (attached to my wired LAN) are
> controlled by DHCP - but I've tried all kinds of other combinations to no
> effect.

eth1 needs to run a DHCP server, so it shouldn't use DHCP, it needs to have
a static ip address.  Also, the fact that there is another DHCP server on
that eth1's network is a cause for concern -- you shouldn't usually have
two dhcp servers on one network.

This may be the reason for your problems above.

> I'm trying to use Firestarter as my router but Firestarter always fails on
> start, claiming that the eth1 connection isn't ready. During Firestarter's
> setup wizard, the DHCP settings section is grayed-out.

I'd be inclined to turn off Firestarter for the time you're doing this.  

> In addition, I haven't been able to link to the LAN computers (while they're
> running Windows) through Samba (the appropriate Windows network name does
> appear in smb.conf).

Can you ping them by ip address?  Samba is a rather complex thing which can
fail for a multitude of reasons.

> Regarding my Internet connection: on boot, Ubuntu loads what appears to be
> the correct ip info for my DSL provider on ppp0, but nevertheless provides
> only crippled access (the network connection manager shows a very limited
> number of packets being up and down loaded and, practically, I can't
> actually load anything in a browser). Running poff in terminal doesn't work
> as I get a "no pppd process for provider 'ppp0'" message. pon dsl-provider
> does activate a working Internet session on ppp1 using, for all intents and
> purposes, the same ip info (except that my ISP provides a new dynamic ip
> address).

What is the output of the command 
	route -n

in particular, is the ppp device your default route (0.0.0.0)?

Gavin