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Eduardo Trápani | 4 Jul 2011 17:17
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LTSP on a regular machine

Hi,

I have a Bondie Blue iMac (150M memory) running Debian (powerpc). 
Everything works, X, network, sound.

I want to install LTSP to be able to run Firefox, flash, etc. from the 
server *but* the packages ltsp-client / ltsp-core-client say that it is 
a regular computer and I cannot install them.

What would be a sane workaround to be able to use LTSP on that machine?

If I could only install ltsp-client on top of the fully working debian 
installation!!  Any ideas?

Thanks, Eduardo.

PD: As a side note the battery is dead (I cannot set the default boot 
device) and I already have a DHCP server in the network I cannot modify 
...  So boot enet:0, even if I have to do it manually, does not work.

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David Burgess | 4 Jul 2011 19:09
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fat client account questions

Dear peers,

Server: 'slab'
       Ubuntu 10.10 amd64
       admin account: 'david'

Client: 'ren'
       Ubuntu 10.10 amd64

I have been using LTSP for about 4 years now and love it.

Yesterday for the first time I began to play with a fat client setup,
following the instructions here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/FatClients

and almost everything just worked great with no headache.

The one exception where I'm having trouble is with user management.
The account I created when installing the server OS is 'david', so
naturally I have sudo powers there. When I pxeboot the client I am
able to login as david and get a functioning desktop, but this was
unexpected in gnome-terminal:

david <at> ren:~$ ifconfig
Command 'ifconfig' is available in '/sbin/ifconfig'
The command could not be located because '/sbin' is not included in
the PATH environment variable.
This is most likely caused by the lack of administrative privileges
associated with your user account.
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David Burgess | 4 Jul 2011 21:00
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more fat client observations and questions

Ubuntu 10.10 amd64 server and client
fat client only
blank lts.conf file except as noted

1. The lts.conf option 'NFS_HOME=/home' appears to have the opposite
from expected effect, which is to say that if I include the option in
lts.conf and reboot, my home directory is mounted as a ramdisk and
disappears on reboot. If I omit that option and reboot, 'df' shows my
home directory mounted nfs to the server and changes persist across
reboots.

2. The lts.conf option "LDM_DIRECTX=True" appears to have no effect.
When rsync'ing /home from my client disc to the mounted nfs share the
ssh and sshfs processes maxed out the CPU before my network or discIO
resources were tapped (~250 Mbit/s with modern SSDs on both ends).
This looked the same with or without the ldm_directx option.

3. User switching does not appear to be supported. If I click on the
power button in the Indicator Applet Session 0.4.6 I get the error
"Unable to start new display: The name org.gnome.DisplayManager was
not provided by any .service files".

4. Once I log out a user, if I log back in again my /home/user
directory does not re-mount via nfs and I get a default login. I can
log in as one user on the system, log out, then log in as another
user, and both see their home directory and profile at their
respective first log in, but subsequent logins by the same user lose
their home.

Are these known issues? Are there known workarounds? Unfortunately I
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Peter Matulis | 4 Jul 2011 21:12
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Re: LTSP on a regular machine

On 11-07-04 11:17 AM, Eduardo Trápani wrote:

> I want to install LTSP to be able to run Firefox, flash, etc. from the 
> server *but* the packages ltsp-client / ltsp-core-client say that it is 
> a regular computer and I cannot install them.
> 
> What would be a sane workaround to be able to use LTSP on that machine?
> 
> If I could only install ltsp-client on top of the fully working debian 
> installation!!  Any ideas?

As their names suggest, those packages are for the client only.  That
is, they reside in the client chroot directory, which gets transformed
into the client image that is used during an LTSP session, via NBD (for
LTSP 5).

You simply need to PXE-boot your computer and establish a traditional
LTSP session but I have the feeling you want to run everything locally
and only use the server to run your applications.  That's not what LTSP
is for.  The inverse is possible, however, and it is called fat client
computing.

--

-- 
Peter

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security 
threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes 
sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
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Eduardo Trápani | 4 Jul 2011 23:13
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Re: LTSP on a regular machine

>> If I could only install ltsp-client on top of the fully working debian
>> installation!!  Any ideas?
>
> As their names suggest, those packages are for the client only.  That
> is, they reside in the client chroot directory, which gets transformed
> into the client image that is used during an LTSP session, via NBD (for
> LTSP 5).

That's where I want to have them, only in the client!  Let's put it this 
way, instead of doing PXE (which I cannot because of the platform) I 
want to start out with the client environment preloaded, and then go on 
as usual (I have installed many other "normal" PXE clients, but this is 
an old iMac that cannot do PXE and I have been looking for an 
alternative solution.

> You simply need to PXE-boot your computer and establish a traditional
> LTSP session but I have the feeling you want to run everything locally
> and only use the server to run your applications.  That's not what LTSP
> is for.  The inverse is possible, however, and it is called fat client
> computing.

No, you got the wrong idea, or I put it wrongly.  All I want is to use 
the very minimal installation I already have.

I have the server already running.  It looks as if it should be easy to 
run the client from disk instead of booting it over the network.  And 
the, of course, everything would be running in the server, but fuse, 
pulseaudio, nbd and X.

I hope this time I did a better job of explaining it.
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Andreas Schamanek | 4 Jul 2011 23:22
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Re: LTSP on a regular machine


On Mon, 4 Jul 2011, at 18:13, Eduardo Tra'pani wrote:

> ... this is an old iMac that cannot do PXE and I have been looking 
> for an alternative solution.

I happened to have one where Windows was installed. So I followed the 
instructions from 
http://www.tomhenson.com/it-technical-help/mac-pxe-boot-citrix-provisioning-services
I.e., use Grub4DOS and gPXE.

HTH,
--

-- 
-- Andreas

   :-)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security 
threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes 
sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
_____________________________________________________________________
Ltsp-discuss mailing list.   To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto:
      https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss
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Alkis Georgopoulos | 5 Jul 2011 00:58
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Re: fat client account questions

See inline.

Στις 04-07-2011, ημέρα Δευ, και ώρα 11:09 -0600, ο/η David Burgess
έγραψε:
> david <at> ren:~$ grep david /etc/group
> adm:x:4:david
> dialout:x:20:david
> cdrom:x:24:david
> plugdev:x:46:david
> lpadmin:x:106:david
> david:x:1000:david
> david <at> ren:~$

The output of the `id` command, which shows the groups you belong to,
should be the same in both the server and the client.

> david <at> slab:~$ sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/amd64/ adduser david admin
> adduser: The user `david' does not exist.

In localapps and fat clients, the client dynamically reads the available
users from the server, at logon. They don't exist in the chroot.

> I would like to have superuser access on the fat client. What is the
> recommended way to accomplish this? Do I just need to manually edit
> the /etc/group files? Did I mess something up?

Most reasons where you would need superuser access, e.g. installing
apps, modifying network settings etc shouldn't be needed on fat clients.
If you install apps there, they'll be lost on reboot. Install them to
the chroot instead.
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David Burgess | 5 Jul 2011 02:29
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Re: fat client account questions

Alkis, thanks for your response. Mine is inline.

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg@...> wrote:

> The output of the `id` command, which shows the groups you belong to,
> should be the same in both the server and the client.

Client:
david <at> ren:~$ id
uid=1000(david) gid=1000(david)
groups=1000(david),4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),46(plugdev),106(lpadmin)

Server:
david <at> slab:~$ id
uid=1000(david) gid=1000(david)
groups=1000(david),4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),46(plugdev),105(lpadmin),106(sambashare),107(admin)

Close enough, I take it. I understand from your email that sudo isn't
expected to work. Fair enough.

> NFS_HOME=/home means "I exported the server /home in /etc/exports. When
> the client boots, I want it to mount the NFS share to its /home".
> If that doesn't happen for you, you either configured something wrong,
> or have hit a bug somewhere.

Silly me. I installed nfs-kernel-server on the server and nfs-common
in the chroot but forgot to modify the exports file. When my home
directory was mounted by default I didn't think to go back and
troubleshoot nfs. Now that I have done that the NFS_HOME option works
as expected.
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Alkis Georgopoulos | 5 Jul 2011 06:20
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Re: fat client account questions

Στις 04-07-2011, ημέρα Δευ, και ώρα 18:29 -0600, ο/η David Burgess
έγραψε:
> Interesting. Now that /home is mounted via nfs I don't see ssh or
> sshfs in the processes list during bulk transfers. For example 'dd
> if=/dev/nbd0 of=/dev/null' now produces nearly double the network
> throughput. The client CPU is still the limiting factor here, but
> nbdproxy is the biggest hog, and less of a hog than ssh and sshfs were
> previously.

sshfs (which uses ssh) is used by default for mounting the user home
directories when localapps or fat clients are used.
That's because it's secure and easy (no server configuration needed).
If you specify NFS_HOME, then sshfs automatically gets disabled.

You're right about the nbd-proxy CPU usage, it's one of the reasons we
decided against using it in our computer labs here. Nbd-proxy is only
installed by default in Lucid/Maverick, to remove it see comment #13 in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ltsp/+bug/589034

> Too bad for me. Is there a way to hack in user switching support (for
> dummies)? Can I use something other than LDM to get this
> functionality?

I can't think of an easy way to do it currently, apart from installing
GDM in the chroot and also configuring the chroot to use LDAP.
You'd lose all functionality provided by LDM, though.

When sbalneav finishes implementing his pam_sshauth library, you should
be able to do it with the stock login managers (LightDM, GDM etc)
without configuring anything.
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Rolf-Werner Eilert | 5 Jul 2011 08:31
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Sleep mode for clients

Browsing the threads on this list, I just had an idea that might help in 
case of older clients with long booting times but still capable of 
serving LTSP5.

Would it be possible to freeze and store memory of a client after 
booting (and maybe at a point just before starting LDM)? This would make 
it possible to reload it at this very point and start a new X session 
within a much shorter period. The image would of course have to be 
machine-related (maybe with a reference to its MAC number).

For the user, it would mean starting and completely booting for one 
time, then starting and fast reloading ever since.

Hm. It would mean, however, keeping all connections halted and stored, 
so on a server reboot all stored memories might be left.

Does this make sense? As I said, just a spontaneous idea... :-)

Rolf

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security 
threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes 
sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
_____________________________________________________________________
Ltsp-discuss mailing list.   To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto:
      https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss
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Gmane