Copyright © 2004,2005 François Tigeot, David Delavennat, Guillaume Philippon
$Id: admin-guide.xml,v 1.7 2005/10/13 05:49:19 ftigeot Exp $
Abstract
This manual aims to document how to deploy and use a ThinBSD system.Table of Contents
List of Examples
Since the 2004-08-15 snapshot a dhcp configuration infrastructure has been added. It is now possible to use ThinBSD as either a RDP or a X11 terminal with the stock disk image, only changing some parameters on a dhcp server.
Table of Contents
Historically, ThinBSD has been created to run on VIA Epia ME-6000 mainboards. Nowadays, it should run out-of the box on machines with the following hardware :
A PXE boot-rom is needed to boot from the network. All Via EPIA mainboards have one on-board.
The via, trident, i810 and ati drivers are compiled in and should give the best results. In the worst case the vesa(4) one is also present.
The following configuration examples are only valid with the ISC DHCP server.
This is the standard dhcp server on all known Unix and Linux distributions. It may be possible to use the Microsoft dhcp server on Windows.
The following thinbsd dhcp options have to be defined on your dhcp server:
option thinbsd-lang code 128 = text; option thinbsd-use-rdp code 129 = boolean; option thinbsd-rdp-server code 130 = ip-address; option thinbsd-xres code 131 = text; option thinbsd-yres code 132 = text;
thinbsd-lang is required. It corresponds
to the keyboard layout.thinbsd-use-rdp is required. If true,
a full-screen rdesktop session is launched on the terminal. If false,
a remote xdm server is queried instead.thinbsd-rdp-server is optional. It is the IP address
of the Microsoft Windows server to connect to.thinbsd-xres and thinbsd-yres are
optional. They define the resolution of the thin client display. If
not set, the default values of 1280 and 1024 are used instead.
The following options are already defined in the dhcp standard:
x-display-manager font-servers
They take IP addresses and are used if you want to run ThinBSD as an X-terminal.
Example 2.1. DHCP host configuration for RDP
subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.0.10 192.168.0.29;
filename "boot/pxeboot";
option thinbsd-lang "en_US";
option thinbsd-use-rdp true;
option thinbsd-rdp-server server.example.org;
option thinbsd-xres "1024";
option thinbsd-yres "768";
}
Example 2.2. DHCP host configuration for X11
host x-terminal {
hardware ethernet 00:12:34:56:78:9a;
fixed-address x-terminal.example.org;
filename "boot/pxeboot";
option thinbsd-lang "fr";
option thinbsd-use-rdp false;
option x-display-manager bigserver.example.org;
option font-servers bigserver.example.org;
}
We have had good experience with the standard tftpd server on FreeBSD and Tftpd32 on Windows.
boot-latest.tar.gz in your tftp directory.
mfsroot-latest.gz in your tftp
directory and rename it to mfsroot.gz
The client machine should boot from the network and configure itself according to the options put in the dhcp server.
Although the preferable way to boot ThinBSD is from a tftp server, this is not required. The boot process uses an unmodified FreeBSD loader(8) and as such is able to start from any boot device supported by the host machine BIOS. The following ones are known to work:
The easiest way is to label the device, install bootblocks and format a partition. You then only need to copy the ThinBSD files as documented in the tftp chapter above.
The following instructions were used to create a bootable IDE flash module on /dev/ad0; they can be used almost verbatim with any hard disk. You will need a FreeBSD machine to prepare the boot device.
fdisk -B -I /dev/ad0 bsdlabel -w -B /dev/ad0 newfs -n /dev/ad0a mount /dev/ad0a /mnt fetch http://www.thinbsd.org/download/mfsroot-2005-09-25.gz fetch http://www.thinbsd.org/download/boot-2005-09-25.tar.bz2 bzcat boot-2005-09-25.tar.bz2 | (cd /mnt; tar xvf -) cp mfsroot-2005-09-25.gz /mnt/mfsroot.gz