Urgent Help Needed for Gutsy

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Butch Arias wrote:

> I am from the Philippines. Our entire school has been using Edubuntu for
> two years (6.06 LTS and 7.04) on thin clients.  Around 300 students and
> 30 teachers have their individual accounts and groups - and we never had
> problems until we upgraded to 7.10.  After the upgrade, the thin clients
> don't boot anymore, and worse, even the server's DHCP  could not be
> located by the workstation clients. We checked and rechecked the cables
> and they were all well.
> 
> We are planning to reinstall the 7.04 

It's up to you what you want to do, but I'd suggest we spend a little time
debugging the problem.  I'm willing to bet we can fix this without a
reinstall, save quite a bit of hassle and allow you to use the new system.

My first guess is that your DHCP server is not running.  My second is that
you have two network cards and the interface names have swapped (which can
happen). I suggest:

1. Login to the server that runs DHCP and type "ps aux | grep dhcp" into a
   terminal.  You should output like:

	haifa:~# ps aux |grep dhcp 
	root     26042  0.0  0.0   3884  1596 ?        Ss   Nov09   0:03 /usr/sbin/dhcpd3 -q eth1
	root     27834  0.0  0.0   1644   524 pts/0    S+   09:16   0:00 grep dhcp

If there isn't a line containing /usr/sbin/dhcpd3 then your dhcp server
isn't running.  Either way, type 

	sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart

to try to restart it.   If it doesn't  restart, look at the bottom of
/var/log/syslog for an error message telling you why.

If it does restart, try a thin client.  If they're still not working, you
might try pinging an ip address within the thin client range.  Look at the
back of the server and you should see a light flashing every second on the
network card.  Check the light is flashing on the network card which you
have connected to your thin clients.  If the interface names swapped, you
might have the dhcp listening on the wrong network card and need to swap
cables.

Also, note the "-q eth1" above, which tells me the dhcp server is set up to
listen only on eth1.  If you have a specific interface set like this (not
everyone does), try running:
	ifconfig
and you will get a list of interfaces and their addresses.  Make sure eth1
(or whatever it's listening on) has an address for your thin client
network.

One more guess is that some other problem has occurred in the upgrade.  If
you look in /var/log/syslog on the server you would probably see errors.
One thing I fell victim to in several upgrades was EVMS.

http://codepoets.co.uk/upgrade-ubuntu-gutsy-emvs-and-udevd-100-cpu-usage-aka-udevd-going-nuts
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/119315/

which (if you don't use EVMS) can be sorted with

	sudo apt-get remove evms
	sudo reboot

> but we need all the student and teacher accounts and documents from the
> server. How are the accounts and documents transferred to a new HD if it
> is desired to have a clean installation of Edubuntu? I am afraid that the
> accounts may get lost and the documents become inaccessible  considering
> that permissions for folders and documents vary from groups and
> individual accounts. 

All user documents should usually be stored in /home/ so if you back that
up using tar.
	tar cvjf /tmp/home.tar.bz2 /home

you will get a full back up of /home in /tmp/home.tar.bz2.  You can then
expand it out on a new system with
	cd /; sudo tar xvjf home.tar.bz2 

this should preserve all permissions and file ownership.  I would suggest
though that if you're doing a backup you probably also want to backup
/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf and /etc/ (the config files).  

You then need to back up /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/group /etc/gshadow
which are the standard edubuntu user and group files (assuming you're not
using LDAP or some other scheme).

> We need to preserve all the user account data and documents but we desire
> to have all the system files related to 7.10 ignored in the backup as we
> suspect some conflict with the hardware and software when we upgraded to
> 7.10. I believe our present backup includes system files.We are also
> considering a clean install of 7.10 onto another server then a restore
> procedure for the user accounts and documents to test if the system will
> not crash.
> 
> In this connection, please help us in the procedure to backup and restore
> group and user accounts as well as documents documents for Edubuntu.

If edubuntu 7.04 worked fine, the chances are there's just something small
wrong with edubuntu 7.10 and you'd really be better off working out what
that problem is.

Gavin