[Pkg-ltsp-devel] Bug#367606: #367606: swap on thin clients (LTSP) should be turned on as default

[Vagrant Cascadian]

hello.

i've been looking into this issue some, and it's non-trivial to have an
automatically set up network swap.

i will describe the process by which you can enable swap, however. i'll
assume i386 and a default /opt/ltsp installation path, but adjust the
instructions appropriately to your needs.


chroot /opt/ltsp/i386 apt-get install nbd-client

in /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf:

[Default]
NBD_PORT=9210
SWAP_SERVER=ip.of.swap.server


apt-get install nbd-server

in /etc/nbd-server:

NBD_PORT[0]=9210
NBD_FILE[0]=/opt/ltsp/swap/swapfile.%s
NBD_SERVER_OPTS[0]=""

invoke-rc.d nbd-server start


now create the swap files:

MEGS=100
your_ip_addresses="10.0.2.2 10.0.2.3 10.0.2.4"
mkdir -p /opt/ltsp/swap/
for a in $your_ip_addresse ; do
  dd if=/dev/zero of=/opt/ltsp/swap/swapfile.$a bs=1024k count=$MEGS
done

you need to create a file for each possible ip address that will attempt
to connect to the server.

i'm not sure how well this works on sarge- i've been testing in sid, and
it seems pretty functional.


there is currently some work by ubuntu folks to create a more automatic
setup, where the swapfiles are created and removed on demand, which we
should hopefully be able to pull into debian:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FullyAutomaticSwapServer


also, in the recent 0.93debian1 packages, we introduced a USE_LOCAL_SWAP
feature, that will make use of swap partitions on the thin-client's
local disk, if found.

/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf:

USE_LOCAL_SWAP=Y


i know it doesn't totally fix your problems, but work is in progress
towards that end :)

live well,
  vagrant