Hi folks,
I would like to share some experiences I made last week with Debian Edu v11.
I have set up a new server using firmware-edu-11.8.0-amd64-BD-1.iso. I decided
to go for the firmware version to avoid problems with missing drivers I often
had in the past delaying me too much.
I was a little surprised how fundamental the changes are compared to buster.
The old system had its up and downs but it was actually working rather well for
us.
According to the manual the client is built automatically. I can confirm this
and in my case client data is built in /srv/ltsp/x2go-bare-amd64. The PXE menu
remains rather empty though, e.g. not a single LTSP entry is added.
Btw, the PXE menu now really looks ugly compared to what we had in earlier
versions of Debian Edu. Anyway, this is just cosmetics.
Consequently I decided to build the clients afresh using the following command:
debian-edu-ltsp-install --diskless_workstation yes --thin_type bare
The update failed during the process of creating the thin client and were
nicely listed in /srv/ltsp/x2go-bare-amd64/debootstrap/debootstrap.log.
The errors listed didn't make much sense to me and smelled like bugs to me. I
decided consequently to delete /srv/ltsp/x2go-bare-amd64/ and start the whole
build afresh instead of updating it
This worked just fine and the PXE menu showed the two following entries:
• Diskless Workstation (64-Bit, server's SquashFS image)
• Plain X2Go Thin Client (64-Bit, NFS rootfs)
I have various clients at my disposal. "diskless workstation" works just fine
for newer hardware but my older Toughbooks no longer boot and I'm getting the
following message:
This Kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU. Unable to
boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.
AFAIK this could rather easily be fixed in earlier versions of Debian Edu
simply by creating a i386-chroot, which then worked just fine.
"thin client" is still rather mysterious to me. I'm now getting a somehow
strange looking screen dividing login screen instead of the old full screen
login which basically looked just the same as the "diskless workstation" one.
Anyway, I didn't find time to do more tests.
To make my computer lab run with older Toughbooks is important to us. I
consequently decided to switch to another iso image being
firmware-edu-11.9.0-i386-BD-1.iso. I was hoping that using the i386 version
instead of amd64 would allow my Toughbooks to boot just fine.
This time I got the following two PXE menu entries:
• Diskless Workstation (32-Bit, server's SquashFS image)
• Plain X2Go Thin Client (32-Bit, NFS rootfs)
The experiences are not really better than with amd64. I'm getting weird
messages when booting "diskless workstation" on newer hardware, e.g.
[FAILED] Failed to start BIND Domain Name Server
[FAILED] Failed to start Samba SMB Daemon
[FAILED] Failed to start Kerberos 5 Key Distribution Center
[FAILED] Failed to start Squid Web Proxy Server.
It appears that I'm having an issue with a buggy script creating my SquashFS
image. Anyway, I'm getting to the login screen and I can login but the login
screen reappears shorty after again.
The Toughbooks still don't boot using "diskless workstation". This time I got
the following message:
WARNING: PAE disabled. Use parameter 'forcepae' to enable at your own risk!
This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU: pae
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.
I tried to update my client builds but I failed to do so. The server is unable
to access the internet. IP's can be pinged but domain names cannot.
That's all I have for now. Thanks in advance for some input on the many issues.
;)
Kind regards,
Roman
