LTSP-pnp 14.04-1 clients don't boot correctly - black screen

[pacomod]

Hi,

I have installed and I'm using Edubuntu 14.04-1 32bit with a LTSP-pnp setup in a primary school.

After a package upgrade (installed on 2015/10/12) and after the server had been rebooted, the clients were not able to boot correctly.
Everything seemed to be ok (WOL,PXE,TFTP boot), but the clients ended up with a black screen with a single underscore…
I've got a login prompt on the console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) but I was not able to log in with any username/password.
The clients still responded to Epoptes reboot/shutdown orders though.

I tried to figure out what was going on by activating a shell screen (SCREEN_02=shell in lts.conf, as explained in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/ClientTroubleshooting), and saw (with dmesg) that nbd root and swap partitions didn't seem to be mounted correctly (nbd[01]: unknown partition table), although nbd connections seemed ESTABLISHED from the server side (netstat -c | grep nbd).

For the time being I've downgraded the LTSP-related packages to a previous running version (found with: apt-cache showpkg <pkgName>):
apt-get install epoptes=0.5.7-1
apt-get install epoptes-client=0.5.7-1
apt-get install ldm=2:2.2.13-1
apt-get install ltsp-client-core=5.5.1-1ubuntu2
apt-get install ltsp-client=5.5.1-1ubuntu2
apt-get install ltsp-server=5.5.1-1ubuntu2
apt-mark hold epoptes
apt-mark hold epoptes-client
apt-mark hold ldm
apt-mark hold ltsp-client-core
apt-mark hold ltsp-client
apt-mark hold ltsp-server

The server is now up and running with clients able to boot correctly, but I still find the "nbdX: unknown partition table" message in dmesg on the client side even if nbd0 and nbd1 are mounted on root and swap, thus this may not be relevant.

Here are the LTSP-related packages installed on 2015/10/12 (found in apt log in /var/log/apt/term.log):
epoptes (0.5.8-1~ubuntu14.04.1) over (0.5.7-1) ...
epoptes-client (0.5.8-1~ubuntu14.04.1) over (0.5.7-1) ...
ldm (2:2.2.16~r1581+p979+201510031948~ubuntu14.04.1) over (2:2.2.16~r1580+p979+201509221427~ubuntu14.04.1) ...
ltsp-client-core (5.5.4+r2677+p1235+201510031950~ubuntu14.04.1) over (5.5.4+r2669+p1235+201509191638~ubuntu14.04.1) ...
ltsp-client (5.5.4+r2677+p1235+201510031950~ubuntu14.04.1) over (5.5.4+r2669+p1235+201509191638~ubuntu14.04.1) ...
ltsp-server (5.5.4+r2677+p1235+201510031950~ubuntu14.04.1) over (5.5.4+r2669+p1235+201509191638~ubuntu14.04.1) ...

Regards

[Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg)]

Hi, LTSP in Ubuntu has been broken for some years now, it's lacking a lot of necessary fixes that are upstream in LTSP.

Use the Greek schools PPA to get a working LTSP:
sudo add-apt-repository --yes ppa:ts.sch.gr
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

...both in your server and your chroot.

I've changed the Affects list, it's not related to LTSP upstream which is fine, but to the Ubuntu packaging.

[Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg)]

New LTSP/LDM releases can become available for older Ubuntu versions by following the SRU procedure as described in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates.

I'm marking this bug as "Incomplete" so that it expires if noone follows the SRU procedure, it doesn't make sense to keep bug reports open if noone will be working on them.

Please follow the steps described in that page and set the bug status to "Confirmed".

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ltsp (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]