Fwd: Edubuntu and K12LTSP together.

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sun, 06 May 2007, Krsnendu Dasa wrote:

> I have downloaded Edubuntu 7.04 and I was thinking of running it as a
> VM under VMware server.
> 1. Can I set it up so K12LTSP keeps running for most users, but 1 or 2
> terminals run from edubuntu instead?

I guess it's probably possible, but it sounds quite messy.  You'd probably
need to give the server a second ip address and only let the vmware stuff
use that IP so that requests for nfs, ssh, nbd, ldminfod all bypass the
K12LTSP stuff to get serviced by edubuntu in a vm.  You'd want to be _very_
careful doing this that you don't break k12ltsp and take your existing thin
clients down.

Personally, I'd find another machine to install edubuntu onto (it need not
be terribly powerful to run one thin client off).

> I am currently running two ltsp servers in parallel and for one of the
> thin clients I have specified that I want it to run form the first
> server only by specifying server = ltsp1 in lts.conf. Now that ltsp 5
> is using ssh the system for doing this might be different now.

When I run two ltsp servers, I generally just set the "next-server"
directive in /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf for a particular mac address.  This means
that once the first dhcp request happens, everything thereafter will be
from the alternate server.

> 2. If I mount both systems to point to the same  /home will that cause
> any difficulties?

So you're going to get the second server to mount /home over nfs?  No that
shouldn't be any problem.  Two points to mention though:

 - you probably have a different UID on the two servers which means you'll
   have file ownership issues (ie if your UID is 1002 on server1, the
   second server will give ownership to whoever is UID 1002 on server2).
   The simplest temporary approach is to just set your UID to be the same
   in /etc/passwd -- a more thorough approach probably uses NIS or LDAP.

 - When you share out /home/ in /etc/exports, you should share it to that
   second server ip address _only_.  Otherwise anyone on the network can
   mount it and have full read-write access to everyone's home directories.

> 3. I was thinking of first testing Edubuntu using a VM as the client
> then trying it on "real" client. Are there any tips for testing this?

> Any other tips for how to test ltsp-5 without messing up my current
> system would be greatly appreciated.

I guess it depends what hardware you have available, but if you just want
to test one or two thin clients, I really think you'd be best off
installing onto some spare machine and using DHCP to point a couple of thin
clients at it.  This will be more like real life and far less risky/complex
to get working.  Running VMs does work, but I definitely wouldn't suggest
it on your production server.  Arguably using sound/localdevs from a
machine to a VM on that machine (ie not over a real network) is not a very
good test as the network will be artificially fast.  However, I know
several of the developers do it for testing.  I can't recall (though would
love Scott or Oliver to remind me) what the VM software was.

I don't mean to be nagative, but I'd hate to risk downtime on your existing
K12LTSP setup just to test edubuntu.  Keeping things simple will probably
avoid that.

Gavin