Draakwired

At work, I have been tasked with setting up a Linux terminal server to lighten the load of our exsisting Windows server.

LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) is quite a nice piece of software. It makes good use of PXE netbooting, but it should also work with RDP.

Get Suse

Download the openSUSE-Edu-KIWI-LTSP-live-unstable.i686 iso from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/iso/

Why Suse? It has good support for LTSP and RDP.

Setting up RDP on Suse

Setting up RDP on Suse was very easy (compared to Ubuntu LTSP):
You can skip this if you installed from the live DVD.

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dreveman:/nomad/openSUSE_11.1
# nomad zypper in rdesktop xrdp xorg-x11-server-dmx xorg-x11-server-rdp


Now you need to edit /etc/sysconfig/kiwi-ltsp and add:

USE_NOMAD=”1″

Run to update the configuration:

kiwi-ltsp-setup -c

Now start the xrdp server with:

rcxrdp start

PXE booting

PXE booting is a nice feature of network cards. It allows the computer to pull the operating system over the network, and boot the pulled operating system. The user can start applications, but they are not run on the client, but on the server. This is done with several services.

DHCP to tell where to get the boot image from.
TFTP this actually delivers the boot image, based on UDP.
Xorg to display apps on the client side which are actually run on the server.
SSH to provide a secure connection between the Xorg server on the client and Xorg on the server (using option -X)

This should work out of the box when this is the only server in your network, and you do not already have a DHCP server on your network.

But we already have DHCP

LTSP assumes that you do not have an DHCP server yet and it runs one for you. This is quite bad if you already have a DHCP server running, which we have. Turning the dhcp server on Suse off is done with this:

insserv -r dhcpd && rcdhcpd stop

To turn it off forever you can remove the dhcp-server package:

rpm -e dhcp-server --nodeps

This should work until the next time you run kiwi-ltsp-setup, so I’ve been told.

You need to configure your original DHCP server (not the ltsp) , by editing the dhcpd.conf:

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
option routers 192.168.0.1;
range 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.254;
#add this and replace with your own LTSP server ip:
next-server 192.168.0.2;
filename "pxelinux.0";
}

If you try to PXE boot it now, it will fail somewhere at the startup. Press F2 to see the init messages.

You also need to edit /srv/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

The line (its under LABEL kiwi-ltsp):
append initrd=boot/initrd-ltsp vga=791 splash=silent showopts

should become:
append initrd=boot/initrd-ltsp vga=791 splash=silent showopts kiwiserver=192.168.1.231 kiwiservertype=tftp

Try booting it now, and it should work.