Now that the ltsp-server and ltsp-client packages are allowed to be
installed simultaneously (LP: #950945), I thought of an extremely simple
method to install and maintain LTSP fat/thin computer labs that should
be appealing to certain setups like small school labs.
We'll probably start using it in Greek schools in a month, and I'd like
to ask the community for feedback on where this could lead to problems,
and also on whether there's interest in an internationalized version of
the "ltsp-server-pnp" package that we'll develop to automate this.
The installation steps for this new method will be:
1. Install your server normally with any DE you prefer (Gnome, KDE,
XFCE, LXDE...). Also install and configure on the server any
applications that you want to have in your thin/fat clients.
2. Add the repository for the yet-to-be-developed ltsp-server-pnp
package, which automatically installs and configures ltsp-server,
ltsp-client, dnsmasq, PXE menus etc for you.
3. Reboot your server and select "Recovery console" in the grub menu.
From the recovery menu that will appear, select "Generate LTSP image".
This will create the /opt/ltsp/images/i386.img NBD image, and it will
need about 5-10 minutes to complete, without requiring Internet
connectivity.
That's all, you can then boot your server normally and start your
thin/fat clients. If you need to "update your chroot" in the future, you
just do any changes you want directly on the server (add/remove apps or
settings) and follow step (3) again.
Pros:
* Great simplicity. As you've seen, there's *no LTSP chroot
involved*, so no "ltsp-build-client" step, no "ltsp-chroot install
packages" step, no "manually transfer gconf mandatory settings to the
chroot" step.
Cons:
* Loss of flexibility. The server needs to be the same arch as the
clients, so you'll probably want the i386-pae kernel in your server. You
can't even have different packages installed in your server than in your
thin/fat clients. But you can still have e.g. apache, mysql, sshd etc
installed on your server and put them in the RM_SYSTEM_SERVICES lts.conf
directive so that they don't run in your clients. No, that doesn't put
any additional RAM overhead, your clients can still have as low as 128
MB RAM no matter how many services you have installed on your server.
And of course in bigger setups you can use a separate server for
NFS/apache/whatever, and only keep the LTSP-related services in the
server where ltsp-server-pnp runs.
* Security concerns. E.g. the clients will have the same sshd keys as
your server. But I think that in step (3) above, the security-sensitive
data can be regenerated or omitted. And of course /home, /srv, /opt, and
user's entries in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow will be omitted too in the
NBD image.
* Finally, your server needs to be rebooted to update the NBD image,
so some downtime is involved. This will be avoided in the future when
BTRFS snapshots will be available.
Thoughts? And, does anyone care about an internationalized Ubuntu
Precise/Debian Wheezy package for this?
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