On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Jim McQuillan wrote:

> John and Brian,
> 
> I've tried booting a diskless computer over a WAN.
> 
> It's not pretty :(

*** I agree, it's not anything to write home about. However, for some
applications (non X-related) it has potential. I know of one individual
who wants to use LTSP to boot/configure diskless firewalls at various
client locations. Not a bad idea - All that is needed is to boot the
kernel and load a few ipchains/iptable rules and you're all set. Make sure
the NFS export is mounted as read-only and it should be fairly tamper
resistant. Just another simple use of a very flexible package you have
created (great job!). 






> 
> 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
> 


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