Goodbye LTSP (for now)

ASUS M2N-MX SE and nVidia MCP61 made me do it. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why dhcpcd was failing on me. It seemed quirky that I had to make enhancements to the niclist to make the kernel recognize the appropriate forcedeth. And quirky it was - dhcpcd failed to load, probably for a socket bind error - who knows! I couldn't find a log on the LTSP server that the client threw (probably because it was too early in the boot up process).
But anyway, I have given up for now.

My new workstations get Fedora 9. And my really old ones get Vector Linux (its great - really!). If the oldies fail to even load Vector Linux, then I will try LTSP again. Till then... adieu LTSP!

LTSP nightmares continue ...

Now to the dhcpcd failed error on K12LTSP. There is a totally whacko reason given here, which of course, was not applicable to me.
Have I figured out a way? Not yet. But I am almost sure its by sweet nForce chipset MCP61 forcedeth acting up.

LTSP nightmares

Yes, there we go again. I have the ASUS M2N-MX SE motherboard with the nVidia nForce MCP61 chipset. And I'm trying to run K12LTSP on it. First, I figured out where to get the NIC from botting off the network. That was simple. Now, I had to actually 'boot'!
Ooh, what a freaking nightmare that has been! I FINALLY found out what the solution was: to make changes to the initramfs and compulsorily add the NIC kernel module. One dutch site was nice to give instructions on how to!

cd /tmp
mkdir initrd
cd initrd
gzip -dc /tftpboot/lts/2.6.17.8-ltsp-1/initramfs.gz | cpio -id
emacs etc/niclist

Now look for 'forcedeth'. And add the following after the last entry:

10de:0086 forcedeth
10de:008c forcedeth
10de:00e6 forcedeth
10de:00df forcedeth
10de:0056 forcedeth
10de:0057 forcedeth
10de:0037 forcedeth
10de:0038 forcedeth
10de:0269 forcedeth

Then, you run the following commands again:

find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > /tftpboot/lts/2.6.17.8-ltsp-1/initramfs
cd /tftpboot/lts/2.6.17.8-ltsp-1/
rm initramfs.gz
gzip initramfs

Got it? Expect it to work? Yes? No.

One more change to go: in the pxelinux.cfg/default file, you need to add NIC=forcedeth in the append list. Backward and ancient technique used for ISA cards.

Done? Not yet. Now we have a dhcpcd failed error. Haven't figured out a way to solve it. Will sleep over it and write back...

One interesting site regarding this is: http://www.geocities.com/nf2ltsp/

LTSP anyone?

I have had this idea for a long long time. Probably since LTSP was first launched. Now probably is the time when I will implement it in my school labs.
First, I needed cheap hardware. REAL cheap hardware. So I found out that I get an AMD Sempron processor with an ASUS M2N-MX SE motherboard with 512MB RAM and 80GB SATA HDD for like 10K. Which is somewhat affordable.
Next, of course I spent time searching for whether the on-board LAN adapter supported booting from the network. Sadly, there was no such documentation. Well, I went ahead and bought one machine anyway, just to check this out. Well, the answer is YES, the LAN adapter on the motherboard (NVIDIA® nForce™ 430 MCP) DOES support booting from LAN, via PXE. You have to go to the BIOS and go to the SouthBridge peripheral settings, where you can change the settings. You then have to mention in the boot order that you want to boot from LAN first. It works!
There was, and is, a problem with the ACPI settings of the BIOS. I have to upgrade the BIOS, or turn off ACPI, to allow Linux to load. The kernel panics if ACPI is enabled.
Well, more on LTSP will come as I go ahead and install a client and server...