Re: [Ltsp-discuss] when hardware is not autodetected - how to debug, where is docs?

[Ken C. <kc...@co...>]

Otto Kekäläinen wrote:

>Hello!
>
>Most of my enviroments machines run LTSP 4 nicely, but a few machines has 
>hardware which does not get autodetected. The hardware does work on linux, 
>since these machines run mepis/knoppix well.
>
>How should I debug a situation where the X or the kernel is unable to detect 
>some hardware? What logs contain the essential info? Where is ltsp version 
>4's lts.conf well documented? I guess the hardware issues could be resolved 
>by putting special parameters in lts.conf for the non-working machines, 
>right?
>
>
>  
>
I had a similar situation where hardware worked with Linux, but the 
auto-configuring of LTSP did not work.

I had to add some lines of code to the DHCP server config file 
(dhcpd.conf) for the specific workstation host that did not 
auto-configure well. 

Example of lines to add to DHCP are:

At the top of the DHCP file:

option option-128 code 128 = string;
option option-129 code 129 = text;

Inside the specific workstation host:

        option option-128     e4:45:74:68:00:00;   #This is NOT a MAC 
address
        option option-129     "NIC=pcnet32";

The option-128 string above must be copied exactly as is.  It tells 
etherboot that the following line is a kernel command line parameter to 
be passed.  The option-129 is the configurable string. 

In my case, the workstation would DHCP and load the kernel, but the 
auto-configuring of the network driver was guessing the wrong driver.  
By forcing the correct network driver (see above), the remainder of the 
LTSP boot process worked.

lts.conf is mainly used to configure LTSP client software, not hardware 
drivers.

Ken Cobler