LTSP 4.2 Local Device support on ALT Linux 3.0 or Sisyphus

Overview

All the packages are in place, you won't have to mess with compiling stuff by hand (and fixing the consequences and dependencies).

Otherwise, follow generic instructions until software installation is at hand.

Package Installation

You should either have recent unstable (packages submitted 2007-01-18) or backports/3.0 when the packages get there too; as a last resort, both SPECS and SRPMS should be available here to be able to rpmbuild --rebuild them.

For 3.0, plugging backports can be done by adding this line to /etc/apt/sources.list (see the site for proper instructions including repo signatures):

rpm ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/backports/3.0 i586 backports

First fetch recent repository information:

apt-get update

For 3.0, you need to install FUSE kernel module (check `uname -r` regarding installed kernel flavour; included in 2.6.14+):

apt-get install kernel-modules-fuse-std26-up

The rest of packages is installed by:

apt-get install fuse shadow-groups ltsp-server-pkg

This will fetch a few more packages we'll need.

FUSE access

You can either let everyone use fusermount:

control fusermount public

or restrict it to "wheel" group and add users there (which might have other implications):

control fusermount public
apt-get install shadow-groups
gpasswd -a someuser wheel

Configuring LTSP localdev support packages

As these were already installed, you should just follow generic instructions again.

You might be interested in hacking ltsp-device.sh to get non-ASCII filenames on local devices working correctly; you might also need something like charset=866 for FAT volumes with Russian filenames. See also this page (in Russian).

Virtualization tips

If you need to put LTSP into virtualized environment like Linux-VServer or [[http://openvz.org/] OpenVZ^?]], it might be interesting to know that this was actually done; hints for OpenVZ (the harder case due to more developed container isolation) are available (in Russian) for NFS, FUSE and overall setup. Hopefully some of these will be non-issues during 2007.

We're running ALT Linux Sisyphus x86_64 (dated end of 2006) HN (hardware node) with ALT Linux 3.0 Compact i586 in one of VEs; it's a multi-purpose 4-way Intel Woodcrest server running also 64-bit contexts but a bunch of 64-bit desktops still seems overkill this year, so we've limited LTSP container to 3 cores and 2 Gb RAM and provided separate I/O (physical drives) to TS and build containers.

Contacts

In case of any trouble with ltsp-server-pkg build for ALT Linux, please contact me at shigorin/gmail/com. I'm quite short of time so please don't ask general LTSP- or e.g. FUSE-related questions, these are not going to be answered.

ALT Linux is popular in exUSSR, high-quality-RPM based distribution; those who speak Russian might have heard of it already and those who don't are welcome to community-en@ but generally we're quite, well, local on that 1/6 part of the world.

-- MichaelShigorin - 18 Jan 2007