2. Prerequisites
I have decided to start with the prerequisites based on the pain I went through.
I was first deeply into the documentation and worried so much about how to make this
thing work rather than focus first on the services and programs that need to be
running on the system for the success of LTSP. By doing this, I am just making your
life easier and you won't have to go throught the struggle I have been into.
To be honest, if I had paid more attention to the process in the beginning of the
documentation, I could have avoided all those ambiguities. Well if you don't know
something and you're doing a research on how to make it work on a newer system than
the one it is known to be successfully running on, you are looking for a tremendous
amount of attentions from the hardware to the software perspectives. Let's now turn
into the aim of the project.
I am doing the experiment in a lab with PCs in the range of PII and PIII, most of them
are Dell machines and have at least 128MB of RAM. The OS I am using is Red Hat Linux
version 8.0. I use three PCs alternatively as server and workstations (i.e. one server
and two workstations.) I have a separate network from the corporate (firewall in between.)
Make sure you investigate your hardware specially the graphic and the network cards of
both the server and the workstations. Find out the availability of an etherboot code
for your Ethernet card at this link. Organize your
machines and write down the specifications of each one of them:
If you have Linux already installed, you need to check whether you have dhcp, nfs, and
tftp servers installed. You can check using the following:
#rpm -V dhcp(or dhcpd)- If this doesn't work try "rpm -qa | grep dhcp".
And do the same for the others. If you are lucky and have them already on your system,
you can go on the next stage of this documentation. If not, you will need to install them
from CD or download the rpms that you need and install them using the following
as root:
#rpm -ivh filename.rpm
If you haven't installed Linux yet, make sure you include the servers mentionned above
at install time.
Now I think you are ready to go to the next section.