[K12OSN] Edubuntu and K12LTSP together.

John Lucas mrjohnlucas at gmail.com
Sun May 6 03:27:30 UTC 2007


On Saturday 05 May 2007 22:24, Krsnendu dasa wrote:
> I have been using K12LTSP 6 successfully for a while and I thought I
> would test out edubuntu (to see how the sound and local apps feature
> of LTSP 5 works.)
>
> I have downloaded Edubuntu 7.04 and I was thinking of running it as a
> VM under VMware server.
> 1. Can I set it up so K12LTSP keeps running for most users, but 1 or 2
> terminals run from edubuntu instead?
>

Sure as long as the virtual server has a static address on the "bridged" 
interface, you should be able to configure your DHCP server (on your "real" 
server) to tell the selected clients to use the virtual server. Make sure you 
don't have the DHCP server running on the virtual machine; no need and it 
would interfere. This assumes that you have sufficient RAM and that you 
export your /home to include the virtual server. You could even include a 
second virtual NIC to communicate with the host over the hostonly network 
(reducing load on the physical NIC). There will be a loss of performance 
(since your are doing more and have divided your resources), but for testing 
you should be able to live with it.

I did a similar thing, but with a K12LTSP 5 (ltsp 4.2) VM running on a K12LTSP 
4 host. I also used VMware server to create a virtual diskless workstation, 
complete with USB storage and soundcard. I ran both "real" terminals and 
virtual terminals on both real and virtual servers.

On my laptop I have a complete demonstration network: virutal K12LTSP 5 server 
on the "hostonly" network with a virtual diskless workstation, communicating 
through a virtual IPCop firewall to the "NAT" network (so that it works 
wired, wireless, or disconnected). All with only 1GB of RAM and using VMware 
Player (virtual machines were created with VMware Server and copied to the 
laptop). The host OS on the laptop is Fedora Core 6.

> I am currently running two ltsp servers in parallel and for one of the
> thin clients I have specified that I want it to run form the first
> server only by specifying server = ltsp1 in lts.conf. Now that ltsp 5
> is using ssh the system for doing this might be different now.
>

I used DHCP settings and two separate lts.conf files (one on each LTSP 
server). I think that this would be cleaner, getting the correct kernels 
and / filesystems from the correct server for each system. There may be some 
subtle difficulties introduced by mixing and matching those components.

> 2. If I mount both systems to point to the same  /home will that cause
> any difficulties?
>

I can't see why it would unless the same user is logged into both servers 
(lock files can prevent applications from running on the second invocation). 
Same problem exists with muliple logins on the same server.

> 3. I was thinking of first testing Edubuntu using a VM as the client
> then trying it on "real" client. Are there any tips for testing this?
>

No tips, but I didn't find any problems. VMware virtual machines have their 
own BIOS that includes PXE boot and you can set the boot order so that it is 
invoked first.


-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
| St. Thomas, VI 00802                http://mrjohnlucas.googlepages.com/ |
| 18.3°N, 65°W                        AST (UTC-4)                         |




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