[K12OSN] Laptop as roving standalone and thin client

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Fri Sep 22 03:57:26 UTC 2006


On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 22:24 -0500, ssanders at coin.org wrote:
> I am trying to put together a laptop for use as a standalone laptop and
> as a thin client. having a local distro is easy enough, and scripts to
> rsync the /home back/forth isn't a problem. 
> 
> What's the best way to integrate the laptop as a thin client? It's an
> old IBM A21 with an integral network jack, but neither it's 'network
> boot' choice nor universal boot floppies will pick up the network
> properly. Other network boot PCs work on the same K12LTSP 4.4.2 server.
> 
> Wireless would be nice, but I understand the problems of getting it's
> PCMCIA wifi cards to init first to network boot. This would be the only
> wireless client, so it could probably suffer by on wifi's bandwidth.
> 
> What works: after it's on the LTSP network with either wired or wifi,
> issue an init 1  then X -query server.
> 
> I have the old K12LTSP wifi boot floppy (and the Orinoco/Hermes card it
> needs), but it's a rather low-power NIC.
> 
> Is there a better way to use the laptop for this?

Put a minimal setup on it and have it run XDMCP and do all else from the
server over whatever network you have for it. Now do all authentication
from the server and mount the /home dir from the server. This will dodge
the netboot issue (it will  get a shell and networking from the local
stuff on the laptop) and make it so it is "any user capable".

BTW: This process can be further tweaked to make a laptop useless is
stolen: Make the boot area unwriteable by turning of the BIOS "boot
virus blocker". Password lock the BIOS after making the boot order hard
drive only. Make the /, /bin, /sbin, /etc read only mounts (do this
AFTER the system is up and tested. /var and /tmp will need to be
writeable (so they are on a separate partition each). Mount /home from
the server using NFS. The only system user should be root (with a LONG
password!). All other users use NIS+ (or Samba-LDAP or...).

With out the root password and/or in connection with your network, the
laptop is basically useless (barring a new hard drive and opening the
case to reset the BIOS password).
> 
> TIA
> ss
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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