Problems booting ltsp clients under 10.04

[Rippl, Steve]

Hi,

We're having great difficulty getting all clients in an LTSP lab to
boot up consistently, it appears to be related to the new nbd-proxy?
Here's the report our tech that builds the LTSP servers for us gave
me...


=====
When 2 or more switches are between client and server a failure to boot
occurs before launching LDM about %50 of the time.  The frequency of the
failure to boot is reduced by being connected to the server with only
one intermediate switch but does not go away completely.  The following
bugs seem to reference the same problem and indicate that it is
nbd-proxy that is falling down during the boot process.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ltsp/+bug/604314
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ltsp/+bug/589034

The latter of these references a patch that when applied disables the
activation of the nbd-proxy during the client setup process.  My success
rate for booting clients after applying this patch rises to about %70.
Load seems to effect this condition adversely as well as speed and
duplex transitions such as many 10/100 clients connecting to a server
attached to a gigabit port. The clients in question are Atom based and
include gigabit ethernet ports but are connected to 10/100 ports in the
classroom.  Switches being used include HP Pro-curve edge products as
well as a variety of unmanaged 10/100 5-8 port switches.
=====

We had none of these problems in 9.04.

Are any of the developers listening on this aware of this and possibly
working on it?  I have posted our experiences on Launchpad, but
there's no indication of anything happening.  School starts here in
about 4 weeks and this is bad enough that we're considering rolling
back to 9.04.  There are nice new features in 10.04 I'd like to give
folks access to, but I don't want folks to have to reboot clients
multiple times to get them to come up...

Thanks,
Steve

--
Steve Rippl
Technology Director
Woodland Public Schools
360 225 9451 x326