How to boot an LTSP client?

[Eamonn Sullivan]

On 16/10/05, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> hi,
> Am Sonntag, den 16.10.2005, 15:34 +0100 schrieb Eamonn Sullivan:
> > What I'm stuck on is a *really* basic concept -- how to PXE boot a
> > client. I have the server on my normal desktop. I have another Windows
> > desktop (the previoulsy mentioned one, directly connected to the
> > router) and an IBM ThinkPad T21 laptop with a wireless card (Netgear
> > WG511v2 PC Card). Both have an option to boot from the LAN in their
> > bioses. But if I choose that, it doesn't work -- both boot up into
> > Windows as normal.
> PXE only works via wired networks, i guess the BIOS setting on your
> laptop applies to your internal NIC... try with a wire connected ;)
> PXE then looks for a dchp server on boot and requests the kernel via
> tftp from the source thats configured in the settings of the dhcp
> server. after booting up the kernel it mounts your rootfs readonly from
> the server via nfs and starts up a X login manager...
>
> ciao
>         oli

Thanks. It always happens that I struggle with something for a couple
of days and then figure it out 20 minutes *after* posting to
Ubuntu-users-list...

Anyway, I now realize I need to choose "Intel Pre-boot environment" on
the thinkpad. When I try that when wired it finds the server, loads
the kernel, goes through the hardware recognition process and then,
when it finishes executing something called /scripts/nfs-preboot, I
get an endless stream of Read: Connection Refused. If I CTRL-C out of
those I get a message saying the server doesn't have NFS over TCP and
I'm left at an ash prompt.

I've checked /etc/exports (it's sharing /opt/ltsp  *(ro,no_root_squash,async)
, and anyway, it must have loaded the kernel from somewhere), checked
the firewall settings (even turned it off at one point) and my
hosts.allow looks like this:

portmap:        192.168.0.0/24
rpc.mountd:     192.168.0.0/24
rpc.statd:      192.168.0.0/24
in.tftpd:       192.168.0.0/24

I still end up stuck in the same place. What else should I check?

(I'm hoping the magic of posting to the list will work here. I should
discover my error in about 19 minutes....)

-Eamonn