Can a few linux gurus please help me???

[j0n1n]

Hi Guys,

im new to linux, busy studying for linux+ exam
after speaking to a few people on this forum and others i understand the best way to learn is by doing...

so i am busy doing a project that will helpfully help me understand more about this amazing OS and have fun along the way.

I have a duel core PC with 4GB of RAM and have vmware running on windows 7 64bit pro.

i want to setup LTSP and have two "dumb" pc's boot from images on my virtual centos server...i plan to have the thin clients boot vector linux (as i read its a very light distro) from images on the server. i want to use the thin clients as general work stations for internet and use libre office to write docs etc...as well as other software.

so i have a few questions:

if i put another network card in my physical machine, can i configure DHCP on centos to only distribute addresses over the "new" card to my thin clients?

currently im using NAT for my connection on the virtual centos server and it has an internet connection. I only want cent server to distribute addresses on the "private" lan of the "new" card. i dont want to have cent distribute ip's to all my workstations on the entire network...is this possible?

once i get this right i will look at setting up LTSP on the server and doing the rest of the project.

thanks for reading
any tips/help greatly appreciated
j0n1n

[atreyu]

Hello and welcome!

I've moved your post to a place where it will hopefully get better attention.

[atreyu]

if i put another network card in my physical machine, can i configure DHCP on centos to only distribute addresses over the "new" card to my thin clients?

Yes, the DHCP daemon can be configured to listen on a specific device. For example, if you have eth0 and eth1 and you want DHCP to only listen on eth1 then you can edit this file:

/etc/sysconfig/dhcpd

and in it put:

DHCPDARGS="eth1"

then restart the daemon, e.g.:

service dhcpd status

currently im using NAT for my connection on the virtual centos server and it has an internet connection. I only want cent server to distribute addresses on the "private" lan of the "new" card. i dont want to have cent distribute ip's to all my workstations on the entire network...is this possible?

Are your other workstations set up to use DHCP? If so, is there another DHCP server on the same segment, I assume? If all this is true, then there may be conflicts with the two competing DHCP servers. On your DHCP server, you can hard-code the clients by their MAC addresses, so that they and only they can attach to your DHCP server. In your dhcpd.conf file, you'd have something like this, for each client:

  host pcA {
    hardware ethernet 00:24:3e:44:22:aa;
    fixed-address pcA;
  }
  host pcB {
    hardware ethernet 00:24:3e:00:33:bb;
    fixed-address pcB;
  }

Then in /etc/hosts (or via DNS - check out dnsmasq) you'd want to resolve pcA and pcB to ip addresses, then those IP addresses will get assigned to only those PCs w/matching MAC addresses.

[j0n1n]

thanks Atreyu...does it say where the post was moved to??? and thanks for that info...cool stuff...will give it a whirl
centos is using the same network card as the host operating system...so i can put another card in and have the centos dhcp talk only to the machines on that segment...awesome!!!

[atreyu]

Heh, sorry about that - moved it to Installation.

Have fun and let us know if you have problems with DHCP. If you're satisfied with this particular issue, you can mark the thread as Solved using the Thread Tools link at the top of the page.