Setting up a JavaStation Department of Computing Science University of Alberta

Overall Setup of the Javastation

1. The software required for a javastation can be found at http://www.sun.com/javastation.

2. Some documentation on setting up a javastation can also be found at http://www.sun.com/javastation.

3. Please also read Javastation Troubleshooting for information on how the javastation is really set up and how to fix problems that might occur. However, where the Troublshooting Guide refers to auto.home please read auto_home for our installation.

4. A boot server is needed for the javastation. The boot server must run dhcp (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and should be running solaris 2.5 or greater. The current boot server for the javastation jarvie.cs.ualberta.ca is sibbald. Sibbald can only be used to boot javastations that are on subnet 4.

5. SUNWdhcsr, SUNWdhcsu, JRE1.1.2, SUNWjdtb, SUNWjshm and SUNWjsos are installed on sibbald so that the Javastation can boot up and run a web browser. If you want the Javastation to run HotJava Views (which allows you to do somethings other than just use the station as a web browser, then you also have to install SUNWjdt, SUNWjsvm and SUNWjdtd as well as put a web server (apache will do) on the boot server (sibbald).

6. To get at home directories, the javastation looks for an NIS map called auto_home to tell it what directory on which machine corresponds to the home directory for the user. The javastation then attempts to mount the directory (which is a whole different story). I created an auto_home file under scapa:/etc/auto_home and fixed up the /var/yp/Makefile to build and push the auto_home map to the other yp servers. If you want to look at the map you can do
   ypcat -k auto_home

Problem Areas

1. The biggest problem area is with dhcp because we don't have much documentation on it. The 2 Sun packages SUNWdhcsr and SUNWdhcsu that contain dhcp do not contain any documentation! I got some documentation from Sun that is stored in /usr/sibbald/Javastation. The dhcp daemon is started up at boot time by /etc/init.d/dhcp. If you have to kill the daemon, then please run
   /etc/init.d/dhcp stop
   as root on sibbald. To start the dhcp daemon up again, run
   /etc/init.d/dhcp start
   as root on sibbald.

2. If the dhcp daemon starts reporting in /var/adm/messages on sibbald that a javastation ip address is unusable, the it probably (most definitely) means that some other machine is using that ip address. The javastation will not be able to display a login window. Find the errant machine and fix it, stop the dhcp daemon, in the file /var/dhcp/129_128_4_0 change the 07 to a 03 on the line that corresponds to the javastation that was having the problems, then restart the dhcp daemon. The fix should be done as soon as a problem is noticed because 2 messages are logged to /var/adm/messages every 7 seconds or so.

University of Alberta

Computing Science

Computer Operations