remote access? was Re: [Ltsp] Trafton Academy: pilot K12LTSP installation

[Michael Murray]

Your assessment is certainly correct regarding ease of installation; 
over the long weekend I ran three more successful K12LTSP v 3.12 
installations on dual-processor PII boxes. One of these servers went 
off this afternoon to Trafton with Sabrina Duhe, so Trafton now has a 
dual PII Xeon 400MHz server with 512MB RAM and a 9.1GB SCSI drive 
(Sabrina will call later with a report on its performance). This frees 
up the P3 server at CACRC for other uses.

For those who wish to install the K12LTSP package, I find it prudent to 
run the installation with a single ethernet card installed and 
connected to a functioning hub or switch. This card will be 
automatically configured as eth0 and will provide DHCP connection to 
PXE-boot the thin clients. After installation and clients are shown to 
boot properly, install the second ethernet card, connect it to your 
router or cable/DSL modem and reboot. The system will detect the new 
card and offer the opportunity to configure it to look for a DHCP 
server. Once you finish booting you're all set to surf the net from any 
terminal.

The other two servers are HP Kayak XU dual PII 400MHz with 448MB RAM 
and 9.1GB drives. One is long-since promised to a school in 
Ponchatoula, the other is not yet allocated....

I spoke with David Grant of CACRC this morning and suggested he select 
a school in Baton Rouge for an early installation. We figured to call 
for two BRLUG volunteers to "adopt" each participating school; they 
would provide assistance with installation/configuration and bridge 
communications between BRLUG, CACRC and the on-site system 
administrator. So adopt a school and start clamoring for a free 
computer lab (or labs) on their behalf. We are moving with dispatch and 
the wait may be short.

David will confer with others at CACRC regarding an install/configure 
session for sometime next week. I expect we'll run through a complete 
installation on at least one server with several terminals. We hope to 
get a system running in their lobby for all to see and use. This is 
destined to be our testbed for the present, and we look for group 
assistance in configuring it for remote administration.

Configuration issues that come to mind: it is possible to set the 
system to log in the clients automatically for an anonymous session; 
this might be appropriate for younger students, while older students 
could be given user names and passwords and an allocation of storage 
space. Utilities exist for converting a text file of user names to 
login names and random passwords: makes it easy for the sysadmin to 
deal with a large student body. Also, we note here that storage space 
is quite limited on the servers we have. We suggest the school acquire 
(at school expense) and install (with BRLUG assistance) an IDE drive 
for storage of all user files. All system files remain on the faster 
SCSI bus, for performance as well as easing system reinstalls. LDAP 
directory services will become an issue as we install multiple terminal 
services into the same network; an LDAP whiz (if there are any in 
BRLUG) could start us on the right path. We have a number of HOWTOs 
available online for other issues, such as setting IceWM as the 
default, disabling Gnome and KDE (to minimize the load for processor 
and bandwidth constraints). Then there's the matter of installing CUPS 
printers....

Michael Murray