8 Managing diskless clients

8.1 User management

For a start, you might want to copy the password and group files from the server, however, managing users becomes significantly easier if you use LDAP or NIS to make user account information accessible from all hosts.

NIS is parcially supported in the FreeBSD base system, but LDAP is recommended as it easily integrates with other network services and other systems. This section will document an LDAP solution.

To support LDAP you need to install the following packages:

• security/pam_ldap

• net/nss_ldap

• net/openldap22-client

Obviously you also need to setup an LDAP server. You need to install net/openldap22-server. Setting up the LDAP server is beyond the scope of this document. Creating an LDAP directory and configuring clients to authenticate against this will not be covered at this moment.

8.2 System maintainence

Since we installed the full system in a separate directory, maintaining it is as simple as chroot'ing into that directory and update/install as on a normal system, both for installing third party applications from ports and for updating the base. This will not interfere with the server applications.

One thing to be aware of, when we set up the server, we installed kernel and modules in /var/tftp/boot on the server. This path is not within the diskless base directory. To solve this, you can change the configuration of the tftp server such that the kernel is loaded from /var/diskless/FreeBSD/boot or such that kernel is loaded via nfs.

For some ports to build correctly, you may need access to the device file system within the chroot'ed environment. To get this, before chrooting, run the command:

# mount -t devfs devfs /var/diskless/FreeBSD/dev

The first thing you want to install is cvsup and then update the ports tree.