John and Brian, I've tried booting a diskless computer over a WAN.
It's not pretty :( The problem I ran into was with having the root filesystem over NFS. NFS uses a blocksize of 4k or 8k, depending on the version, and the MTU is only 1500 bytes. This causes all NFS blocks to be fragmented. That, combined with the fact that NFS uses UDP makes for a real problem getting all of the NFS fragments to the workstation, then re-assembled properly. I don't want to suggest that it can't be done, just that I wasn't successful at it. I dropped that idea and now one of the workstations also acts as the LTSP server for that office. Now that LTSP uses an initrd, and we have control over the mounting of the root fs, you could play with the mount parameters, and reduce the NFS blocksize down, below the MTU, to avoid the fragmentation, but you may want to consider one of your workstations having a hard disk. Hope that helps, Jim McQuillan [EMAIL PROTECTED] John Cuzzola wrote: >>Hi, >> >>Now that I have my workstations connecting to the server using the private >>IP address range, how do I get them booting over the Internet? >> >>I would like to setup a VPN over the Internet from client workstations at a >>customer site, such as Internet kiosks, but I want them to connect to my >>server. >> >>Please tell me this is possible. >> > > *** It's doable..How you do it depends on the situation. > > Do you have a DHCP server available locally (ie: can your kiosks query a > dhcp server?). If so you can specify all the ip information just add an > "option next-server <ip-address of your server>" to the dhcpd.conf file > > If you don't have a dhcp server available then another possibility is to > boot off a floppy or a hard drive. Recompile a kernel for the client (I'm > not sure on what you need for LTSP 3 since I'm still using 2.07 and am > quite happy with it). Put it on a floppy with DOS & loadlin. Boot off the > disk and boot the kernel with: > > loadlin kernel root=/dev/nfs \ > nfsaddrs=nfsaddrs=<my-ip>:<serv-ip>:<gw-ip>:<netmask>:<name>:<dev>:none > > see http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.4 for info > on the above parameters. > > Of course you can do the same as above with a little hard drive space and > lilo. Finally if you don't have a hard drive or floppy available (truly > diskless) I guess you could 'hack' etherboot and hard code the necessary > values to create a boot rom. > > > > >>Thanks. >> >>Brian Armstrong. >> >>_____________________________________________________________________ >>Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss >>For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net >> >> > > > _____________________________________________________________________ > Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss > For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net > _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
