Help! 10.04 LTSP configuration using only one nic

[Jim Christiansen]

Good morning, David.  Thank you for the help and any ideas.  My clients are
(year 2006) Dell GX620s with 3.6 ghz p4s and all with 1 gig ram.

I've never used two nics in any of my other LTSP setups as I had always kept
them behind IPCOP firewalls.  I haven't had to apply iptable rules for years
and really don't understand what the 1st history command, #49, is doing.
 There is no mention of eth0 or what ever.

I don't know who Alkis is, but is he running his setup on a 100 megabit lan?
 Could the fat image be slimmed down I wonder?

I've just talked to the VP and he says that money is tight to purchase gig
switches.  I had been thinking of yanking the 20 100 mbit switches and
swapping in new gig switches.

I'll be in a pickle here pretty soon.  Thanks again,  Jim

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 8:14 AM, David Groos <djgroos at gmail.com> wrote:

> What hardware are your fat clients running on?  Is there a difference in
> RAM between the good and poorly functioning clients?  I've seen these
> symptoms before I upgraded the RAM on all my (Pentium 4's, 2.4-2.8 GHz) fat
> clients to 1 gig.
>
> Alkis insists that a regular PC (with sufficient RAM) works well as the
> LTSP server IF you are using fat clients.  In his labs the teachers actually
> uses the server as their classroom PC!  Makes the whole thing more
> affordable and practical.
>
> Do you mind sharing why you chose to use a single NIC setup?
>
> Good luck,
> David G
>
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Jim Christiansen <
> jim.c.christiansen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've just had an aging server fail to start up and need to get to the
>> bottom of another problem on another new server running Ubuntu 10.04 LTSP
>> before attempting to do another install.  We lost one server in the Library
>> late last June- rgreat timing and another one just today that served my
>> classroom has failed to start up-  Both are 5 years or older.
>>
>> My old Centos LTSP server for our Library died near the end of June.  My
>> students had been playing with a new 10.04 64 setup and had it serving 32
>> bit fat clients, but really slowly.  One of the students altered something
>> in iptables to make it function and I wonder if this could be the problem.
>>  Grepping my history for iptables shows:
>>
>>  49  sudo iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING --jump MASQUERADE
>> --source 192.168.1.0/24
>>  50  sudo sh -c 'iptables-save > /etc/ltsp/nat'
>>
>> This was done, apparently, to allow the system to function with one nic.
>>
>> The system is sitting on a 100 megabit network with 26 clients.  Only 1/3
>> to 2/3 of the clients will boot right off.  The others will linger with 4
>> four little streaming dots in the middle of the screen for minutes until the
>> log in screen appears or they fail with errors:
>>
>> "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
>> INFO: task modprobe:436 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
>> "echo 0 >... same as 1st line
>> INFO: task udev-configure-:936 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
>> "echo 0 > ...same as 1st line
>> INO: taskhdparm:1020 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
>> "echo 0 > ...same as 1st line
>> INFO: task S32ltsp-client-:1027 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
>>
>> It doesn't seem any better it I boot fewer clients or more... They just
>> don't all start up reliably.
>>
>> The clients run awesomely once students get logged on.
>>
>> Does anyone know what the problem could be?  I'm wondering if the natting
>> is the problem or if I have other issues.
>>
>> Thanks everyone,
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
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>
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