Setting Up a New LTSP Server

Spring is coming, which is my favorite time of the school year.  Between now and late May is when most of the work gets done.  Students have spent the year thus far acquiring the skills they need to do exciting projects, and they haven't yet hit the "it's Summer" mode that kicks in around mid May and ends most productive learning.  So now is the time to make things happen.

The first thing I want to do is get our infrastructure improved so we have the hardware and networking tools we need to support our projects.   This week there are two main goals:

1. Getting a ticketing system in place.
2. Setting up a new LTSP server to free up the machine on which it is currently running to use as a KVM server.

Our new sys admin, Devin Kuhn, is working on the ticketing system.  He plans to use RT, and I'll let him blog about that project.

I'm setting up the LTSP server using these instructions.  I ran into a problem with the install, where it asked me to insert the same CD I was using for the install in the middle of the installation.  The problem, and the solution - burning the image onto a DVD instead of a CD - is documented here.

Installation proceeded without incident until the Building Thin Client System step, where it failed, and I got the evil looking red screen with error message.  I hit cancel and proceeded with the next step, installing grub, and the installation finished without any additional errors.

Since we want fat clients, not thin clients anyway.  The failure to build the thin client system may not be a problem.  I plan to look at this documentation to install the fat client system, and will report on my progress in a later post.