gutsy and regular PCs on edubuntu lan

Gavin McCullagh gmccullagh at gmail.com
Thu Nov 1 09:45:18 GMT 2007


On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Bill Moseley wrote:
 
> I like the idea of the single NIC solution since that would simplify
> wiring and mean the server could more easily be separated from the
> clients on our existing LAN.
> 
> But, our LAN has an existing dhcp server, which is not setup to handle
> the network boot.  So, I assume, we need dhcp running on another
> machine (the ltsp server) to boot the thin clients.  Correct?

Fundamentally, you need to have one DHCP server which is serving the
correct PXE/Etherboot booting information.  Edubuntu's dhcp server is set
up to provide this, but it's possible to serve the same info with other
DHCP servers too (if they support it).

You must not have two independent DHCP servers on one network though.

> But, would that also not require setting up the existing dhcp to
> ignore the thin clients dhcp requests?

If you use edubuntu's DHCP server, you would turn off the existing DHCP
server and let edubuntu do dhcp for all your machines (which it is
perfectly capable of for all windows machines, printers, etc.).  If you
can't do that and the other server can't serve the PXE DHCP information,
you should probably look at the 2-NIC approach.

> I guess I'm not seeing how to setup the server with a single NIC with
> and existing dhcp server (if that dhcp server can't be modified).

If you can't modify the existing DHCP, the 2-NIC approach is probably
what you need¹.

Gavin

¹ A good long time ago, someone worked out a way on a 1-NIC network to
  modify the DHCP to run on a different udp port, but I really wouldn't
  recommend that.




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