Switch to a Linux Terminal Server Project network environment

Posted on April 27th, 2009

Get your old computers working as UNIX terminals! Setup a Linux Terminal Server with LTSP on Ubuntu, and use it from a remote workstation!

Im sick of losing machines, and having to reinstall from scratch, so if all goes well on this project, I will be able to run my blade server without even thinkiing about how to set each one up, beyond configuring each blade to boot from the Lan instead of the local hard drive, and instead concentrate on maintaining just the one central server.

Before you cry Single Point Of Failure – and it is, my comeback is that instead of having to make each server resilient, I only have to harden the one, saving time effort, and computer resources. Backups are essential, so I will have a remote machine rsync essential data on a CRON schedule. I will also improve the resilience of the server itself. This can be accomplished by having a couple of spare ethernet interfaces, a bit of software RAID (mirroring the partitions) and optionally a redundant hot/warm spare or even offline server knocking about will do for my purposes =)

To get an LTSP server running on an existing system running Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu (which has an LTSP install option) or even Edubuntu, which sets up LTSP by default, you will need to set up a static Ethernet interface where you will attach the thin clients, install two packages and run a single command.

On the server (it can be a desktop, but for this scenario lets call it the server) configure your static / spare interface for the thin clients to have
the IP 192.168.1.1, then follow the instructions below.

sudo apt-get install ltsp-server-standalone openssh-server

Create your Thin Client environment on the server with.

sudo ltsp-build-client

After that, you will be able to boot your first thin client. Note that
if you want to use another IP than the above, you need to edit the
/etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf

file to match the IP values and restart the dhcp server. If the IP changes (shame on you for not using IP aliases with IP/MAC address takeover tut tut) after you have done the initial setup, run
sudo ltsp-update-sshkeys

to make the ssh server aware of the change.

nb The ltsp-utils package from universe (for dapper) is for a different ltsp version, installing them together will break, so I gather. Maybe worth avoiding that, unless you have a test machine you can experiment on.