Hello everybody,
we have two ethernet cards in our thin clients, one internal (TP) and one fibre
optic card (via PCI bus).
After installing a new ltsp server with the Debian squeeze ltsp image (but
with nbd instead of nfs), lots of thin clients failed to boot (sometimes).
They did not get the right NIC when starting the kernel - sometimes.
I spent days to
* understand, which part is responsible for what between
PXE - syslinux - initrd/initramfs - kernel
* try to write an udev rule to name the different NICs right
* find the places, where things can be configured without changing the ltsp
source code.
Finally I found a quite nice solution, hoping that this will proof true.
I changed the file /var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.cfg/default to:
default ltsp
label ltsp
kernel vmlinuz
IPAPPEND 2
append ro initrd=initrd.img quiet splash nbdport=2000 ksdevice=bootif
It took me quite some time to find the options IPAPPEND and especially the
ksdevice=bootif combo.
This leads to a kernel command line for the ltsp client that incorporates the
same bootinterface as taken by PXE.
While on a standard thin client, you get:
root@neo14,~: cat /proc/cmdline
ro initrd=initrd.img quiet splash nbdport=2000 BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz
Now we get:
root@otc2,~: cat /proc/cmdline
ro initrd=initrd.img quiet splash nbdport=2000 ksdevice=bootif \
BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz BOOTIF=01-00-30-84-6a-2b-5f
Until now, every machine seems to find the right boot interface automagically.
To the developers:
Would it do any harm, to change the ltsp source code to reflect the above
settings, make this the default?
I tried to put these options into configuration files but did not find any
suitable. Neither /etc/ltsp/update-kernels.conf (on the server) nor
/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ltsp/update-kernels.conf (in the image) changed anything
when I ran ltsp-update-kernels and ltsp-update-image. The default file stayed
untouched. Or is the syntax wrong:
BOOTPROMPT_OPTS="quiet splash nbdport=2000"
IPAPPEND="2 APPEND ksdevice=bootif"
NBD_PORT=2000
Any hint would be appreciated.
Helmut
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Helmut Lichtenberg <[email protected]> Tel.: 05034/871-128
Institut für Nutztiergenetik (FLI) 31535 Neustadt Germany
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