IRC chat logs for #ltsp on irc.libera.chat (webchat)
Channel log from 22 January 2019 (all times are UTC)
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| 07:22 | <fiesh> afaik btrfs has writable snapshots
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| 11:23 | <woernie> Hello, first thanks for this project. I'm pretty new to ltsp. I've set up an ltsp on Ubuntu 18.04 and I have 32bit clients and 64 bit clients
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| 11:23 | With ltsp-build-client --purge-chroot I've set up a 64bit client and a 32 bit client
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| 11:24 | the 64 bit clints connect good but not the 32bit I can I have both 32 bit and 64 bit clients?
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| 11:24 | <alkisg> The easiest way is to have a single 32bit installation on the server for all clients with no chroots
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| 11:24 | Any reason not to do that?
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| 11:25 | <woernie> I was thinking to have the full power of the server, but my thinking myght be wrong
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| 11:28 | Also to have the full power of fat clients
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| 11:32 | <alkisg> It doesn't make much difference
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| 11:32 | Unless your clients have more than 8 GB RAM
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| 11:32 | How much RAM does your server and your clients have?
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| 11:39 | <woernie> clients most 64bit have 1024-4096 the 32 bit client 512-1024 the server (It's a VM on proxmaox with 20GB RAM and couls have upto 60GB RAM)
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| 11:41 | there are around 10 64bit clients and 2 32bit clients
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| 11:43 | <alkisg> woernie: are you going to have any thin clients?
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| 11:43 | Well anyway, even if you have 2 thin clients, it's still better to:
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| 11:44 | 1) restrict the server ram to 8 gb
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| 11:44 | 2) use just one single i386 chrootless installation anywhere
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| 11:44 | You lose 10% speed, you gain 20% ram for programs, no big deal
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| 11:45 | i386 installations only have issues if you use them with lots of ram, where a bug hits and the disk access gets 100 times slower!
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| 11:45 | So with 8 gb ram on the server (it doesn't need more), you'll be great with just 32bit installation]
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| 11:46 | An alternative would be to have 64bit chrootless on the server, and a tiny, thin 32bit chroot just for the 2 clients
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| 11:46 | But the server still wouldn't use the extra ram
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| 11:46 | *need
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| 11:48 | So anyway, all that said, you can configure 32bit vs 64bit chroots either with mac reservations in dhcp/dnsmasq,
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| 11:49 | or via ifcpu64 in the pxelinux level,
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| 11:49 | or with cpuid at the ipxe level (we'll probably use that one in ltsp6)
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| 11:49 | So in dnsmasq.conf you'd configure that the 2 i386 clients would get the i386 chroot, instead of the amd64 chroot
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| 11:52 | <woernie> I've found that "ifcpu64" but I couldnt set it up to work. Is there a Documentation.
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| 11:53 | <alkisg> Not in ltsp. There is documentation in the syslinux site.
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| 11:53 | <woernie> Sorry I've have to go to a meeting right now will be back later
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| 11:53 | <alkisg> np I need to leave too
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| 11:53 | Bye
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| 12:07 | <JuJUBee> Has anybody ever run LTSP Server in a VM?
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| 12:18 | <Hyperbyte> JuJUBee, sure.
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| 12:19 | In fact, I'd recommend it. Assuming you use the right software and know what you're doing.
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| 12:19 | It's really easy to test system upgrades and/or large updates, it's easy to make backups and you can have a complimentary VM PXE client for remote testing of the actual environment
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| 12:21 | When I was migrating to Ubuntu 18, I had two VM's running. I configured (via dhcp) select clients to use the test environment for Ubuntu 18 and the rest the working Ubuntu 16.
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| 12:21 | I've ran both fat and thin clients VM'd.
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| 12:26 | <JuJUBee> Hyperbyte, thanks. How do you mount it in the VM and what virtualization software are you using? I have Virtualbox.
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| 12:26 | I created a folder on host and used vboxsf to mount it via fstab in vm.
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| 12:26 | I cannot create new users if I point their home dir to the mounted folder.
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| 12:26 | in the VM that is.
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| 12:27 | I should clarify I am talking about the users home dirs...
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| 12:27 | I already have the server running in vm fine
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| 12:37 | <alkisg> I think Hyperbyte has /home inside the VM, not outside it...
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| 12:38 | You can also just mount the whole /home *partition* in the VM as a disk
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| 12:49 | <JuJUBee> alkisg, so I tried mounting a partition on host as /home on guest and I cannot create a user. Any thoughts on how to mount it? I used vboxsf to mount in fstab
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| 12:50 | When I asked in #vbox they say "You do *not* want shared folders for this. It's going to fail. Big time!"
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| 12:50 | Should I use nfs to mount as /home in vm?
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| 12:56 | <alkisg> JuJUBee: create a vm disk, and mount it as /home
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| 12:56 | It's the same as mounting a partition, just easier
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| 12:56 | <JuJUBee> OK, thanks. I will try that.
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| 12:57 | <alkisg> Of course there's no failure when mounting partitions, I'm doing it all the time
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| 12:57 | Either you expressed the problem wrong, or they misunderstood, or you misunderstood, or someone that didn't know answered
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| 12:59 | <JuJUBee> So how should I mount from the host to the guest for /home? nfs or vboxsf ? If its NFS don't the user accounts also have to exist on host?
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| 12:59 | <alkisg> JuJUBee: ah you didn't understand
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| 12:59 | I proposed: create a vm disk, like /home/jujube/virtualbox vms/ltsp/home.vmdk
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| 13:00 | And attach it to the vm like a usual emulated disk
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| 13:00 | The vm will see it as a sata disk
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| 13:01 | This way it's usual ext4, no fancy file systems
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| 13:01 | <JuJUBee> So the user files will still be inside a virtual environment not a physical?
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| 13:01 | <alkisg> Yes
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| 13:01 | But you can exclude it from snapshots
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| 13:02 | <JuJUBee> Ah
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| 13:02 | <alkisg> And you can loop-mount it on the host whenver you need it
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| 13:02 | If it's "raw vmdk", you can just mount -o loop home.vmdk /mnt
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| 13:02 | It's like a partition, just within a file
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| 13:04 | <JuJUBee> Can I mount it inside 2 VMs at the same time?
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| 13:05 | <alkisg> No, it's not a networked file system
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| 13:05 | <JuJUBee> ok
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| 13:05 | <alkisg> If you use network file systems, you no longer use normal file systems, and you end up with issues
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| 13:05 | Like "file locks not working", or "wrong posix attributes" etc
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| 13:05 | <JuJUBee> ok
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| 13:05 | <alkisg> Sure, they "usually" work, but be prepared for malfunctions
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| 13:06 | If you decide to use a network file system, go for nfs
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| 13:06 | Put anonymous nfs on the host, so that the clients can access it without user accounts there
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| 13:06 | Of course it's less safe than secured nfsv4, but it'll be easier/faster
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| 13:09 | <JuJUBee> The reason for multiple mounts is that I teach some web dev classes and wand the students websites to be separated from my gateway/classroom website server. Didnt want to have userdir running on main web server if possible.
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| 13:10 | <alkisg> So you want your apache server to show a remote dir?
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| 13:11 | <JuJUBee> Just for ~user accounts
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| 13:11 | <alkisg> So, "yes"
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| 13:11 | <JuJUBee> then yes
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| 13:11 | <alkisg> Then you'd need to configure the apache web server to have nfs access to your VM
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| 13:11 | or something like that
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| 13:12 | <JuJUBee> That is what I was thinking.
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| 13:13 | So it doesn't worry you to have user files in a VM? Maybe I am being over cautious?
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| 13:13 | <alkisg> Oh personally I'm not using VMs in installations
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| 13:13 | Too many things can go wrong, for no benefit to my users
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| 13:13 | This is a good idea only for experienced sysadmins that know how to handle them
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| 13:15 | What are the benefits of a VM for you?
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| 13:15 | <JuJUBee> I wanted the recover-ability of a vm (using a nightly backup)
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| 13:15 | for the server at least
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| 13:16 | <alkisg> And you care about recovering the server instead of the user files?
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| 13:16 | I can reinstall a server in 30 mins, that doesn't worry me at all
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| 13:16 | If you said you'd wanted to snapshot user files, I'd respect that
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| 13:16 | <JuJUBee> No, but nightly backup makes server restore a snap. I backup user files separately
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| 13:17 | <alkisg> From 1000 installations, I think restore would help in 1 case
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| 13:17 | (maintaining 1000 schools here)
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| 13:17 | <JuJUBee> WOW
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| 13:17 | <alkisg> And in that case, it just took me 30 mins to reinstall
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| 13:18 | But if your sysadmin plays with the server each day, then sure, you'd need frequent backups
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| 13:18 | Otherwise remember that with VMs, now TWO file systems can break, either the host or the guest file system
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| 13:18 | And a ton of middleware between
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| 13:20 | <JuJUBee> SO currently I have 2 physical servers, a gateway/firewall/web/database server and an LTSP server. I wanted to keep this scenario but wanted to do it with only one physical box. I inherited an IBM server with 32 cores and 512GB Ram
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| 13:21 | <alkisg> Sure, a monster server _should_ be utilized with VMs
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| 13:21 | My schools have regular i5 machines as servers, with e.g. 8 GB RAM
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| 13:21 | <JuJUBee> My current server is an HP quad core with 8G ram working nicely
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| 13:22 | My gateway/firewall.... is 13 year old dual core with 8G ram and starting to get flaky.
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| 13:22 | Figured it was time to change
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| 13:25 | <alkisg> How many disks does your server have?
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| 13:25 | <JuJUBee> 4 at the moment 1TB RAID 5
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| 13:26 | <alkisg> Anyway, I think in your case I'd go with regular LTSP in a VM, with "regular" nfs home, and just export the nfs read only to the web server
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| 13:26 | !nfs
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| 13:26 | <ltsp> nfs: to enable NFS home directories for localapps and fat clients, install nfs-kernel-server on your server, nfs-common on your client (don't forget ltsp-update-image), and put this in lts.conf: FSTAB_1="server:/home /home nfs defaults,nolock 0 0"
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| 13:26 | <alkisg> The user data would be inside the VM, snapshotted along with everything
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| 13:27 | <JuJUBee> I also like the vm disk approach. Separate vmdk for /home if I am going to keep everything in vm.
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| 13:28 | <JuJUBee> My host has /home as 2.2TB so I can just place the vmdk there
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| 13:29 | That way I could have separate snapshots of the home dirs and the rest of the server.
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| 20:36 | <||cw> JuJUBee: I've been using this for my vmhosts lately, on zfs. I like it better than proxmox http://www.ubuntuboss.com/ubuntu-server-18-04-as-a-hypervisor-using-kvm-and-kimchi-for-vm-management/
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| 20:37 | I also do 2 small mirrored SSDs for the host OS and the disks in a raidz
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| 21:41 | * Hyperbyte is using the good old libvirt with qemu-kvm | |
| 21:42 | <Hyperbyte> I create LVM partitions on the host which I assign directly to the VM's as disks. That way there's no filesystem overhead from the host and no filesystem that can break on the host.
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| 21:43 | The only thing that can complicate things is that you have a partition table within a partition table, but believe it or not, Linux can actually mount specific partitions from an entire disk written on an LVM partition.
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| 21:44 | <vagrantc> or a partition table within an lvm which has an lvm partition on it ... once that caused me some weirdness... long enough ago that i forget the details
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| 21:44 | but yeah, i've used libvirt for quite some years now
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| 21:45 | with lvm backed devices almost exclusively
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| 22:52 | <||cw> Hyperbyte: I can still connect to VMs using ssh+virt-manager. the bonus is the server is headless but vm local consoles are still just a couple clicks away
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| 22:55 | you can make a zvol in zfs and give that to the VM and not have to deal with lvm or partitions in partitions. far more dynamic and flexible
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| 22:56 | then you can still snap the zvol, clone it, whatever
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