[tech] Why we should not use Mint as the SOE

[David Adam]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014, Bob Adamson wrote:
> My experience for dual booting machines in UCC so far is that the 
> lesser-used OS becomes hopelessly out of date, and then when you do boot 
> into the lesser-used OS you spend all your time updating it or being 
> pestered by update messages. It gets worse the more operating systems you 
> add to a machine. If you want a consistent+identical environment to boot to 
> for things like the fresher welcome, what about imaging a bunch of USB 
> sticks and booting all the machines off those? Bam, guaranteed to be up to 
> date and consistent for all users at the event, and we can even use the 
> windows machines.

If only there was some way of utilising a single computer to serve as a 
central interface for a bunch of terminals. A terminal server, if you 
will.

This is a good segue into "Unfortunately the thinterms don't boot at the 
moment" because the disk server (nbd-server) on Meersau keeps cowardly 
refusing to serve the disk image, with messages like this:

nbd_server[4613]: Size of exported file/device is 426975232
nbd_server[4613]: Negotiation failed/1: Bad file descriptor

I've backported nbd-server 3.8 but that didn't help.

The only other thing I have tried is upgrading the thinterm images to 
wheezy, but I haven't been back to the clubroom to test this yet.

David Adam
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au