On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 11:53:55AM -0800, Ross Boylan wrote: > On Fri, 2008-12-26 at 23:07 +0100, Hans Ekbrand wrote: > > > I've seen several suggestions for ways to make diskettes that will > > > either boot from CD or network. > > > > http://rom-o-matic.net/ is a useful service here. > I used that, though I suspect it's not quite working. I get to the > point where it tries to grab a file by tftp and then it fails with a > time out. > > The server seems to show the request coming in > Dec 23 20:45:00 corn in.tftpd[24442]: RRQ from 192.168.10.21 > filename /ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0, > but no response. I *thought* I saw a message indicating the server was > unable to contact the client when it tried to transmit the file, but I > can't find it in the logs now. > > Other machines on the network can contact the tftp server and download > the file. > > > PXE booting requires an image to transmit. Making the image looks > > like > > > another involved project. > > > > You don't need to create the image yourself, there are ready mades, > > e.g. from LTSP > > I used LTSP, though that raised its own issues, of which the 3 most > important were unclear (at least to me) documentation, Can't really comment this. > the fact that it > didn't work with "testing" as a distribution (which is really a > deboostrap issue), I haven't followed the development of LTSP, or the debian-integration for quite some time, but the older versions (e.g. 3.0) which does not try to bootstrap the distro of the server, but is a stand-alone implementation of a mini OS that only boots to X. > and the fact that this is probably more heavyweight > than I need. LTSP is definately not heavyweight in regards to the resources (CPU, RAM, etc) required by the terminal. But the technology is a bit complex (requires a dhcp server, a tftp server, a nfs server and display manager listening for TCP). Booting from a local CD is simpler in that regard. But how would a system booted by ready-made CD image know from where to get a login-prompt? > It seems LTSP is oriented toward getting each X term to run in it's own > separate environment, whereas all I need is for it to connect to my > display manager (kdm) on the server. The primary use of LTSP is to get low-end terminals connect to a display manager. However, there has been substantial efforts to make it easy to run apps locally (on the clients) since now a days even lowend terminals can do quite some computing by themselves (and web-apps like flash can be quite demanding CPU-wise), and this relieves the server from load. Running apps locally generates new problems, such as authentication, but since your client only has 64 MB RAM you don't want local apps, and LTSP does not require that. > By the way, thanks for the tip > about how to set that up. I filed some bugs against ltsp, if anyone > wants more details. The maintainers have been very responsive, which I > appreciate. > > I think my main problem is that none of my boot methods are working, > which is really kind of weird. Put a kernel and initrd from LTSP on local HD, and boot with GRUB or LILO? -- Hans Ekbrand (http://sociologi.cjb.net) <hans@sociologi.cjb.net> GPG Fingerprint: 1408 C8D5 1E7D 4C9C C27E 014F 7C2C 872A 7050 614E
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