Translation(s): Português Brasileiro


LTSP How To

Upstream documentation with official, detailed information about installing LTSP is at http://wiki.ltsp.org/wiki/LTSPedia.

Installating and configuring LTSP

This section documents a standard Debian LTSP installation on recent versions of Debian (wheezy and jessie), which uses NFS for a root filesystem, and ISC DHCPD.

  1. If you want a complete LTSP server with all the bells and

    whistles:

    apt-get install ltsp-server-standalone
    If you want more fine-grained control, splitting some services off to

    separate servers, you can install ltsp-server instead, and manually install each of the other services.

  2. Build the LTSP client environment, downloading packages from the internet:

    ltsp-build-client
    If your clients do not support 64-bit extensions (amd64), and your server is 64-bit, you may want to build your chroot specifying the

    i386 architecture:

    ltsp-build-client --arch i386
  3. Configure /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf and /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf. Edit /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf to adapt to your network.

    Include the LTSP dhcpd.conf at the bottom of /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf:

    include "/etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf";

    Restart isc-dhcp-server:

    service isc-dhcp-server restart
  4. Configure /etc/exports:

    /opt/ltsp *(ro,no_root_squash,async,no_subtree_check)

    Restart nfs-kernel-server:

    invoke-rc.d nfs-kernel-server restart
  5. Boot a PXE or Etherboot capable machine and enjoy. Note that some older versions of etherboot do not support ELF images, and may not work without additional configuration.

Installing LTSP on Jessie

1. The version of LTSP employed here is 5.5.2-1. This first model has much less flexibilty since the clients must run the same version of distribution and platform as the server. The upside is that the model is easier to maintain. Thus a 32bit version (Jessie i386) is suggested. There is no separate chroot (sometimes referred to as ltsp-pnp) and nbd (rather than nfs) is used to provide a squashfs image.

steps are labelled with a b c etc.

a. Update the server, ensure the ip(s) is/are as desired (static is recommended) and /etc/hosts is as desired.

b. Check to see if the loop module is installed. If not add a line with the word loop to /etc/modules and reboot the server.

c. Install ltsp-server-standalone, ltsp-client (since there is to be no separate chroot) dnsmasq (an easy to configure tool) other desired software and the desktop environment of your choice.

d. On the commandline run as root

This creates a default config file /etc/dnsmasq.d/ltsp-server-dnsmasq.conf

e. If the server will run one subnet containing the Internet connection and the clients it need have only one network interface card. In this case dnsmasq can be configured to run a dhcp-proxy if there already is another dhcp server active. In this case edit the above file to comment out the dhcp range line and ensure there is a line (uncommented) stating dhcp-proxy.

f. If the server will also run a dhcp-server then comment out the dhcp-proxy line and leave the dhcp-range line uncommented, ensuring the subnet entries are correct.

g. On the commandline run as root

h. Edit the config file /etc/ltsp/update-kernels.conf to have the uncommented lines:

i. Inspect and edit as desired /etc/ltsp/ltsp-update-image.excludes as some software running on the server will not be appropriate for the clients.

j. On the commandline run as root

This creates the squashfs image at /opt/ltsp/images used by nbd and takes an appropriate subset of what the actual server is running. Hence the config file in step i.

k. On the commandline run as root

This creates 3 files: /etc/nbd-server/conf.d/swap.conf /etc/nbd-client and /etc/nbd-server/conf.d/ltsp_i386.conf.

If there is an error message "FATAL: Module overlayfs not found" it is a non-issue since aufs is used instead of overlayfs.

l. On the commandline run as root

Notes:

Create users as appropriate for the clients

As this model describes a usage with nbd rather than Debian's default using nfs note that the useful file lts.conf is in/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/ which among other things means that changes made to this file do NOT require a re-creation of the squashfs image.

.

Installing LTSP on Lenny

  1. If you want a complete LTSP server with all the bells and whistles:

    apt-get install ltsp-server-standalone

    If you want more fine-grained control, splitting some services off to separate servers, you can install ltsp-server instead, and manually install each of the other services.

    (you can also get backported packages for lenny: LTSP/Howto/Lenny-With-Backports)

  2. Build the LTSP client environment:

    ltsp-build-client

ltsp-build-client uses the Internet to fetch packages.

In case you got backported packages at step 1., it is strongly recommended to use backports packages too to build client, or you may have incompatibilities (bad ldm version, login failed...). Please, use the following command:

 ltsp-build-client \
  --backports-mirror "http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports" \
  --apt-key /etc/apt/trusted.gpg

(details: LTSP/Howto/Lenny-With-Backports)

In case your thin clients are old, please use the following parameter:

 ltsp-build-client \
  --arch i386

In case you have a slow Internet connection or want to use Local DVDs of Debian. Please use the following command:

ltsp-build-client --mirror file://mnt/Debian_Lenny_Bluray_Image.img --security-mirror none --accept-unsigned-packages

Since the ltsp-build-client uses more than one Debian DVD you would need to build a ?BluRay Image using the jigdo template of ?BluRay Disc. This Image location can be passed as the argument. The security-mirror-none option prevents updates from being downloaded. The accept-unsigned-packages allows the building to go on even using unsigned packages.

Customizations in the chroot

Two important configuration files inside the client are /var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/lts.conf (or /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf for NFS) and /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/default/ltsp-client-setup. See the examples in /opt/ltsp/i386/usr/share/doc/ltsp-client*.

See also see the Edubuntu wiki http://doc.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/edubuntu/handbook/C/customizing-thin-client.html (note: Debian LTSP still uses NFS by default).