Fixing a Dying Hard Drive in the Lab at Robert Pogson

I have a lab with 17 seats. The server is one of the seats and is six years old. The clients are 8 years old. One of them has a failing hard drive with increasing failures at fsck and it had to have the OS re-installed. For Debian GNU/Linux that should not happen. Rather than change the hard drive, I installed LTSP on the server and the failing machine now boots PXE from the server and boots in 5s less time. It took about the same time to install LTSP as to change the hard drive on the client:

on the terminal server: apt-get install ltsp-server

on the DHCP server added allow bootp; filename “/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0″; next-server myterminalserverfqdn;option root-path “IPofmyterminalserver:/opt/ltsp/i386″; to the “host” statement for the client and restarted, /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart

on the terminal server: ltsp-build-client

on the terminal server: chroot /opt/ltsp/i386/ and apt-get install openssh-server for remote control of the client

Booted the client and it is in business. Since the booting is 5s faster than from the hard-drive (spin-up and GRUB menu delay) I will switch all the clients to do this as we do not really need the storage on the clients anyway. I could unplug the drives to save power.

How cool is that? I love GNU/Linux. It is the perfect solution to so many problems of IT in education. I have used LTSP since 2003. It just keeps getting smoother although there is some bloat (115MB RAM…). LTSP4.2 could run in 44MB. The difference is mostly that LTSP5 uses the typical structures of a thick client rather than a minimalist chroot. The advantages are that I can use apt-get inside the chroot to use Debian’s management tools.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.