dhcpd setting for booting clients from a 4.2 server and a 5 server

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Wed, 09 May 2007, Krsnendu dasa wrote:

> I have an Edubuntu virtual server running under VMware server running
> on K12LTSP 6.
> K12 works fine. I have tested Edubuntu also by turning off dhcpd on
> K12. That works too.

Cool!

> Now what I would like is that all clients continue to boot from K12
> and only one or two (one virtual and one physical client) boot from
> Edubuntu for testing.

We do this every time we upgrade Edubuntu -- set a couple of machines
running on the new version for a bit to iron out problems.

> What settings do I need to put in the dhcpd-k12ltsp.conf file to make
> this work. Do I have to change the /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf file in any
> way? Should dhcp be enabled on edubuntu or not?

We added a stanza for each host looking something like this:

  host p8-04 {
    hardware ethernet 00:0E:2E:75:A2:90;
    fixed-address p8-04.mt;
    filename "/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0";
    option root-path "/opt/ltsp/i386";
    server-name "edubuntu.machine";
    next-server edubuntu.machine;
  }

The next-server is important to tell the client what host to get its
kernel, etc. from.  filename is the location of pxelinux.0 on
/var/lib/tftpboot/ on the server, root-path is the location of your LTSP
chroot on the server.

NB: some PXE clients I've found ignore the next-server directive.  Just
something to watch out for -- particularly with an on-board network card
that does PXE.

> Any tips would be greatly appreciated. I think LTSP 5 is very exciting
> and I want to keep up to speed with it.

Our only problem in running two servers side-by-side with edubuntu versions
was managing users.  We used NIS (as I knew it better than LDAP), but it
meant that other admins got a little confused by which server they had to
run the user-admin program from.  If you're not doing this in production
with users, you probably won't have this issue though.

Gavin