Pi Net Sever/Help

[Katalyst]

Okay so but of a noob to all of this so please bare this in mind.

 

The ICT department of the school I work at has requested Raspberry Pi. What they want is a Pi Net server PC built and in the corner of their department. It will dish out an IP address and an operating system over the internet and students can do projects. This wants to be done so that when a Pi is turned off it will lose all the data and reset as if brand new ready for the next student. Working from operating systems on SD cards would be too hard to keep track of.

 

This being said if the Pi Net server is configured to dish out IP's, I'm concerned that it will dish them out all over the school so I'm trying to think of a way to contain the IP's and Pi.

 

Am I asking for the impossible?

[bladedanny]

This line from their website

 

PiNet server is by default completely passive on a network. It does not include a DHCP server. It just Raspberry Pis to be able to connect to it.

 

I've never used it but according to this line you should be fine.

[Katalyst]

We've configured it to dish IP's out so that all the Pi's will be able to get on the internet. The problem is this is putting essenially two DHCP's on our network. So the Pi Net server might be throwing out IP's to classroom Windows machines and randomly breaking things. We need the Pi Server to take a bunch of IP's and give them directly to the Pi's without causing a conflict.

[bladedanny]

We've configured it to dish IP's out so that all the Pi's will be able to get on the internet. The problem is this is putting essenially two DHCP's on our network. So the Pi Net server might be throwing out IP's to classroom Windows machines and randomly breaking things. We need the Pi Server to take a bunch of IP's and give them directly to the Pi's without causing a conflict.

 

Can you disable the DHCP server on the PiNet and let your main DHCP server handle it? If they're on the same network the Pis should still be able to access the internet.

[SimpleSi]

I've asked @gbaman1 (Andrew - the author of PiNet) to come along and help out with this discussion as he is the expert

[gbaman]

Thanks Simon.

As developer of PiNet, I want to point out, PiNet does not include a DHCP server, nor does it include any easy way from the PiNet control panel of adding one. If you want to add a DHCP server, it very much leaves you on your own. The thinking being, if you are able to install one and set it up, chances are you probably know that running 2 DHCP servers on the same network isn't a particularly great idea..

I am not sure why you need a second DHCP server? The DHCP server does not manage who has access to the internet, although internet access may depend on which range you are put on I guess? Either way, the main DHCP server should be able to be configured to simply hand out addresses to the MAC addresses of the Pis and put them on a different range?

PiNet itself is set up to basically be passive on a network. The address of the server (which should have a DHCP reservation) is included on the SD cards themselves with the boot files.

 

So to reiterate, PiNet does not include (or make it easy to install) a DHCP server and it is not recommended to do so.

[EamonSch]

Hi, the current situation is we have our live network with dhcp and a pxe boot server (fog). If we setup PiNet directly onto our existing network our dhcp assigns it an ip and automatically sets the dhcp rule pointing clients, who wish to pxe boot, to our existing pxe boot server and not the PiNet server.

 

Our first idea was to setup PiNet onto a separate vlan, secondary NIC attached to our network for internet access, primary nic for pi side. I installed dhcp for the primary NIC and configured it to hand out ip's to the PiNet clients, which worked correctly, however although we had internet access on the PiNet server this didn't follow through to the clients. No doubt due to separate subnets which is why we tried squid.

 

I guess the simple question is how do we setup PiNet to our existing network so it doesn't conflict with our current pxe boot server?

 

Many Thanks.

[EamonSch]

Further to this, we started again from scratch and linked the PiNet server and clients directly to our existing network and the pi clients now boot correctly.

 

Everything seems to work fine now apart from the browsers, Epiphany seems to force close when we try to visit a website and chromium, although brings up our Smoothwall login screen and lets us login, get stuck in a redirect loop. Has anyone seen this before?

 

Many Thanks

[gbaman]

Yeah, I have always found Epiphany to simply be too buggy to use. Chromium though should work fine? I have yet to have any previous issues with it? When the Jessie update is finished, it will be including IceWeasel which is similar to Firefox, but that will be a month or 2 at least.

 

Another option is if you server is powerful, you could try using a base LTSP feature (PiNet is based off LTSP), called LTSP-RemoteApps.

It allows you to run an app on the server sandboxed, then forward it like a standard app on the Pi. I have had great previous success with it and Firefox.

To use it, open a terminal on a Pi and type

ltsp-remoteapps firefox

It will take a few seconds and should fire up. It would be pretty simple to then create a desktop shortcut for it etc.

[EamonSch]

Hi gbaman, many thanks for your response. Firefox starts up perfectly however after prompting to login to our proxy (smoothwall) it displays NTLM authentication errors when we try to visit websites. I tested a stand-alone version of wheezy from the raspberry pi website and it works correctly and doesn't encounter this error.

 

Any idea's?

 

Many thanks for your help so far.