booting thin clients and firestarter

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008, DB Clinton wrote:

> > Can you explain in detail exactly what happens when the boot fails?
> 
> Here's a recap (typed in by hand - there may be errors):
> sis900_probe: MAC 00:2A:43:AE:30:94 at vendor 0X0400
> sis900_probe: vendor :0X1039 Device 0X0900
> sis900_probe: RTL 8201 10/100Mps Phyceiver transceiver found at address 1
> sis900_probe: Using RTL 8201 as default
> rtl8201_read_mode: Medialink on 100Mbs full duplex searching for server (DHCP)...no IP adress [repeat until fed up]

It seems that the DHCP is the problem then.  

Are you certain there's a good network link between the thin client server
(and its dhcp server) and the thin client?  Can you start this running:

	 tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep DHCP

and then boot a client.  If the DHCP request makes it you should get a line
like
	Feb  3 13:12:35 robin dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from 00:1d:d9:3e:da:eb via eth0

where the mac address shown is that of your thin client.  If you don't get
that, there's some loss of connectivity between server and client.

> > You refer to making changes in "etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf".  That's not the
> > dhcp config file in LTSP systems.
> 
> I know. I remarked out (#) "authoritative" (along with every other line, for
> that matter) which I assumed would force the system to read the ltsp
> version. Curiously, webmin, under servers, only shows me the dhcp3 version -
> remarks and all.

Webmin is not supported in Edubuntu.  Some people use it for managing
users, but it's not supported.  It sounds like it modifies
/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf which is ignored if /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf is present.

> It's on the system. Here's the whole thing:

It looks fine.

> > and make sure pxelinux.0, nbi.img exist in /opt/ltsp/i386/.
> 
> They were both in /opt/ltsp/i386/boot/. I copied them to /opt/ltsp/i386/ and
> ran dhcp3-server restart but no change on the client boot.

My mistake, those files don't need to be in the chroot, they need to be in
the tftp server directory, that is /var/lib/tftpboot/, so you should have

	/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/nbi.img
	/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0

You might as well remove the copies you made above.

Gavin