Hi
My last post
was around six months ago, and now I have some problems with Dapper on the 40
client setup at my children's primary school.
Instead of upgrading
Edubuntu Breezy, I created new partitions for Dapper and home, and did a fresh
install at the end of June. I then copied some configuration files, including
passwd, group & shadow, and ltsp & dhcpd.conf, and mounted home
separately in fstab. Right out of the box, I had some booting problems,
even had a server crash once, which went away with updates.
After reading a bit
in O'Reilly's book Running Linux, I installed postfix to enable local mail
delivery between the children's accounts. This is actually a nice sandbox to
learn email without Internet connection, and it avoids undesirable content
entering the server via that route.
At some point I
tried Sabayon, which did not work for me, and I removed it again. Some extra
applications were also installed (including KAsteroids).
Recently, the
network started freezing randomly. The timing is unpredictable, but
every client ceases getting response from the server at exactly the same
point. Waiting for about three to five minutes usually allows the system to
resolve the problem automatically. Neither the CPU nor the network load is heavy
at the time, and the response on the server terminal is perfect. I noticed two
other things: The lights on the network switch flash in unison at a rate of
about 2 Hz under this condition, and a perl script with a name similar to
network-conf floats to the top of the process list in terms of CPU time used.
Cycling the power on the network switch seems to get the server to attend to the
problem sooner, but I may be imagining this.
There are sometimes
problems as well with timeout of the NFS mount of /root during LTSP client
booting (the second ok expected on the brown boot screen).
I proposed to the
teacher that we could go back to Breezy, but he insisted that Dapper works
better on the whole. When the network freeze happens during class
time, he reboots the server, which temporarily helps. This problem did not occur
under Breezy, and everything still works fine most of the
time.
It is true that my
knowledge is lacking, and I know that I am dangerous trying to perform tasks I
don't quite understand. It is also possible that during my experiments, I
changed some setting which I never reversed.
So what are my
options? How do I troubleshoot LTSP networking? Do I reinstall on a third
partition and be more conservative about changes to the default this time? I
would not like to roll back postfix, the kids enjoy their email too much. I
suppose I should get on IRC over the weekend for some assisted troubleshooting
in real time. Any other suggestions?
Thanks
Hendrik Boshoff
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