For various reasons I need a setup with one server, and two diskless workstations. The workstations are to be "fat clients", which means I want to enable them to use their own CPU, memory, etc, for everything. Ideally, the workstation users should not have to notice that they are running diskless at all (except for the PXE booting, obviously...). The workstations should run OpenSuse (some version between and including 11.2 and 11.4) since that is what we use. They don't necessarily have to run a vanilla openSuse install, but as close as possible. The general idea is to PXE boot the workstations, and then let them mount their (root) filesystems on the server via NFS. I tried simply copying an existing OpenSuse 11.4 installation to a directory which I then exported via NFS. The kernel and initrd were then exposed via PXE/TFTP. The problem is that the initrd from the install is tailored to the machine it was installed on, so using it as is did not work. I have made some attempts to use LTSP (KIWI-LTSP for OpenSuse) with very limited success. So, now to my actual question(s): **1) Apart from modifying the initrd by hand to work with the diskless workstations, is there anything else I could use to aid me?** **2) One idea I had was to use the same root ("/") for both workstations, and then mount stuff like /var and /tmp as tmpfs. Are there any pitfalls to avoid here?** **3) Any other ideas on how to accomplish this setup? All ideas are very welcome!**

Some time ago, I've configured LTSP on Debian machine. I've been using it from time to time and it worked. Today it stopped working and I cannot figure out what's wrong. Client says: Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 PXE Software Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation Copyright (C) 2010 Oracle Corporation CLIENT MAC ADDR: 08 00 27 06 AB AB GUID: 8E607128-4C80-4960-BF72-347FDBDB27B5 CLIEHT IP: 192.168.1.163 MASK: 255.255.255.0 DHCP IP: 192.168.1.1 GATEWAY IP: 192.168.1.1 PXE-E35: TFTP read timeout PXE-E39: TFTP cannot read from connection PXE-MOF: Exiting Intel PXE ROM. FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted. I took a look at server's log, but tftp's logs doesn't seem to be useful: Dec 7 22:44:25 Serwer in.tftpd: RRQ from 192.168.1.163 filename /ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0 Dec 7 22:44:25 Serwer in.tftpd: tftp: client does not accept options Dec 7 22:44:25 Serwer in.tftpd: RRQ from 192.168.1.163 filename /ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0 (those messages above are generated by tftp with --verbose mode). So it looks like I've a connection from tftp clients to server, but why did it die? I could not find any way to see more log informations.

What i want is a client that logs in with a web browser full screen and when the user closes it the system shuts down or logs off the user. So I've been trying to mount a PXEBOOT system for a while now.. after many attempts and according to the topology present i've explored many solutions.. and ended up focusing and getting the best results with LTSP and fifefox with the kiosk addon. Now i have an ltsp client that when you login firefox pops up fullscreen, based the session on LXDE and added @firefox www.example.com to the /.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart file, managed to write a script that can detect if FF is running, based on the pgrep command, and shut the system down when it closes.. added the script to the /etc/rc.local file (of the client, /opt/ltsp/amd64/etc/rc.local and also have the script on the client /opt/ltsp/amd64/usr/scripts/ffclose.sh). With the command ps aux | grep "ffclose.sh" i can actually verify that the script is running when the client boots. But it doesn't do what i want. I know that there is the need to give permissions for it to run, so i gave it -x (which allows everyone to run it.. but still nothing happens..) Ps: I've also tried PXEBOOT Porteus, LTSP --kiosk.. with mixed results, Porteus runs awfully on the client hardware, and LTSP --kiosk actually managed to make it boot with a FF fullscreen but every time i configure a system this way i can't access the internet (tried it on Ubuntu 12 and 14 with the same result)

So I'll describe the set-up, then the exact requirements and then the list of options I have tried and then I'll ask if their's a better approach or the best option among the ones mentioned. So we are a group of Machine Learning researchers, We have one very powerful workstation machine, and other decently powerful machines one for each of us. **Requirements :** That the GPU is efficiently or equally allocated among all the active users at any given time while all users are working on the workstation simultaneously. (Ram is huge enough to not worry about and also we don't mind having common hard disks) (Some kind of GPU Virtualization?) We are looking for an approach that's up and running in 2-3 days. The working OS is Ubuntu 16 on all the machines **The Proposals :** 1. Setting up multiple VMs in the Workstation, one per user and SSH from our current machines. Running a VM over another OS seems like a big overhead plus we'd rather like to spend on more hardware than software licenses. VMWare ESXI bare-metal seems one way to go. 2. The multiseat approach, it would allow multiple users at the same time, though it requires one set of keyboard, mouse and video card per seat, we do have a very powerful GPU dedicated just to the display but again it's just one and multi-seat requires one per seat, while there are slow workarounds to operate with a single video card(xephyr) we'd still need to allocate the computing GPU among users efficiently. 3. Multiple users SSH into multiple Virtual Terminals. The multiple Virtual Terminals in Unix were made in the time where the computers were expensive and a single computer would be shared among different users using Terminals. We'd still need a way to virtualize the GPU. But if all else works good we can still work since their are four users and two computing GPUs so we could run two programs at once assinging each to one GPU manually through the code(Tensorflow), but if there's an approach to virtualize the two physical GPUs into 4 virtual GPUs it'd be best(except Nvidia vGPU). 4. rCUDA, have sent them a request form. Waiting. 5. Some cluster management system such as Apache Mesos. Since single or multiple computers a CMS won't mind and it's made to virtualize and allocate it's resources efficiently among it's clients. 6. LTSP, haven't looked much into it. Now I know I might sound naive in many of above suggestions, so please give a suggestion as per your knowledge. In case anything in the question seems vague please point to it and I'd clear it out.

I have 150 mining servers. They all have own ssd drives, and EthOS distribution based on Ununtu. Now I want to crate centralized server without ssd. All machines will connect by wlan and take the image of OS from central server. I have read about LTSP open source project that gives you posibility to make this. But this package are for ubuntu, but OS on servers must be other. How can I make them to boot OS that are not installed on my central server?

After recently instaling and setting up an LTSP environment, to learn more about it, using a few older spare PC's I have, I noticed that there are packages missing on the clients. In specific [festival](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival) and [sox](http://sox.sourceforge.net/) . At first thought, without knowing much about the ltsp-build-client mechanism, thought it was maybe the fact that the server is 64bit (So possibly had a 64 bit version of these packages installed), that was the reason for LTSP excluding it from the 32bit image. However, after building a 64bit image, and booting it, there was also no trace of these packages files. I ended up having success with chroot'ng into the directory that contained the image files, used apt-get to install a copy that worked on the client, and then ltsp-update-image. However, would really like to know more about the LTSP build mechansim - Anyone know how LTSP decides, out of server installed packages, what to include in a client image, and what not? (I don't suppose order of installation of the three packages in question, matters?)

I hope this is as easy as an already answered question I didn't find on SE. So, I have an LTSP server running CentOS 6. Linux kernel version of both LTSP image and server are the same: is 2.6.32-504.8.1.el6.x86.64 (uname -r), yum is up to date on both as well. Numerous disk-less clients with a nVidia Quadro FX570 card, dual monitor which we recently replaced with a Quadro K620. My problem is trying to install the new nVidia driver, v346.59. An overview of actions and results: - chroot to LTSP x86_64 - run nVidia driver .run file and answer prompts (choosing Yes to include DKMS). - driver file (nvidia.ko) builds - fails to install (not a surprise, as the server has no GPU). - manually copy /opt/ltsp/x86_64/usr/src/nvidia-356.59/nvidia.ko to /lib/modules/uname -r/extra - echo "nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau.conf - cd /boot and mkinitrd with running kernel (producing initram.img). - ensure vmlinuz.ltsp points to correct kernel, initrd.ltsp points to the newly made initramfs - ltsp-rewrap-kernel - exit chroot - as root ltsp-update-kernel /opt/ltsp/x86_64 - boot thinclient to run level 3 - run X -configure - validate xorg.conf.new contains a Device with "nvidia" driver. - start X: both with startx and X -conf xorg.conf.new And now, the problem: X11 loads, some minor complaints about keyboards, and then hangs with a blank/black screen. X kill command works fine, X apps don't start. I suspect the nvidia.ko is not being included in the initramfs because: lsinitrd /boot/initram.img | grep nvidia produces no output. I also suspect something isn't correct with the nouveau black list because: lsinitrd /boot/initram.img | grep nouveau contains all the .ko files installed in /lib/modules/uname -r/ Also, for reference I have manually used dkms to make/install the nvidia.ko module with the same results. If someone could help me understand why the initrd doesn't contain the nvidia.ko driver and why X is stuck on the blank screen I would be very happy. I apologize for not having the actual error messages - the machine is on a different network and I can't copy/paste to it. EDIT: Some additional improvements/notes. - when I start a thinclient in run level 3, and run startx, after stopping the X server if I look at /var/log/X.org.conf I see the nvidia module initializing and it correctly identifies the K620 device as well as the Dell monitor connected to it. If this is the case, could the issue still be related to the nvidia module not being compatible with the running kernel? Or is a xinitrc incorrectly configured? or some other issue?

I'm trying to set up usbip on our thin clients to forward (almost all) USB devices to the server. What I don't want to forward are all input devices and all hub / virtual devices. So I want to exclude everything with vendor id 1d6b (Linux Foundation) together with input devices. My first attempt was ATTRS{idVendor}=="1d6b", GOTO="do_nothing" ENV{ID_INPUT_MOUSE}=="?*", GOTO="do_nothing" ENV{ID_INPUT_KEYBOARD}=="?*", GOTO="do_nothing" KERNEL=="?-?"", ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/add_usbip.sh $kernel" LABEL="do_nothing" However, for reasons I do not understand, the first GOTO is always triggered, resulting in no behavior at all. I then tried KERNEL=="?-?", ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{ID_INPUT_MOUSE}!="?*", ENV{ID_INPUT_KEYBOARD}!="?*", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/add_usbip.sh $kernel" and similarly KERNEL=="?-?"", ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{ID_INPUT}!="?*", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/add_usbip.sh $kernel" which I assumed to be correct based on the scarce documentation I found, but they will just also run for input devices, rendering the keyboard unusable since it is exported to the server. Note that it does not help me to add specific serials or vendor and product ids since the keyboards and mice and other input devices may vary from client to client.

Arm has a limited support for server packages on Linux but is it possible to use ARM board i.e Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi(it uses Armhf instruction set rather than dated Armv6 used by raspberry pi) as a LTSP terminal server? If so, how? Everywhere on internet it talks about raspberry pi as thin client but no where it talks about it as a server.

I will be building a server based on Debian that will have several functions in a small office (5-10 users). The primary function will be as a file server, but I would like to set the office up to use only thin clients connected to this single computer. Additionally I have the requirement that users be able to log into their clients remotely over a VPN. I know that a VPN requires two network cards, 1 to the internet and 1 to the LAN. LTSP also uses two network cards, 1 to the internet and 1 to the LAN. For a server to do both do I need to have more than two cards? (i.e. one to the internet and two to the LAN)

Im thinking about testing out LTSP on a PPC server for a handful of PPC macs. Before I go ahead with testing and building out everything, is it possible to limit what apps are ran on the thin client? Lets say I only want the thin client to be able to run a web browser and adobe reader, is that possible? Almost like an internet café. I'm also open to other suggestions, maybe thin provisioning isn't the right track to head down if I want a really 'locked' down OS.

I have an LTSP server in a network that requires 802.1x authentication. Is it possible to boot the terminals through PXE without disabling the 802.1x authentication? If not, are there alternatives to simply disabling auth for the terminals?