Security, as it's often been said, is a process, and not an end result. Fortunately, Ubuntu makes it easy to keep up to date with the latest security patches.
When logging onto the LTSP network as an administrator you will sometimes find a bubble appear in the top right informing you that there are updates available for your computer.
Any updates you apply here will automatically be applied to all clients, though they may require a reboot. This is because LTSP clients all use the same set of applications on the server. When this prompt appears click the small red icon, and enter your password to display the following application.
This application allows you to apply all available updates for your computer quickly and easily. Clicking on the Check button, checks to see if there are any more updates since the computer last checked. If you are going to perform the updates, it's a good idea to click this button. Once the check is completed, you are ready to update your system.
Be sure to check how much information is going to be downloaded, if you are low on bandwidth, or using a slow connection. Click on the Update button, to set the computer downloading and installing updates. Once clicked, if there are any verification issues, these will be shown. If you are happy that the packages come from a trusted source, you can click OK to continue. First, your computer will download all available packages and display a screen similar to that below.
After all packages have finished downloading, you will be presented with the progress box, which shows how far the computer has come in updating. If you wish you can click the word terminal to show more detailed information about the updates as shown below.
After the updates have completed, the computer will inform you if you need to restart in order for the updates to come into effect. You can either shutdown when you wish, or click the small blue icon in the top righthand corner, and you will be presented with this question.
|
|
|
If you restart your computer without shutting down your clients, their computers will stop responding and they may lose data. Be sure all clients are logged out before restarting the server. |
At some point in the future, updates will become available for your LTSP server. You must remember that altough you may have applied all the updates to the server itself, as in the instructions....HERE it is likely that the LTSP chroot will also need updating. To do this you must open up a terminal and use the following commands.
First make sure the Client environment has the same Package lists as the Server, to achieve that, you will copy the sources.list file from the Server to the Client environment.
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/apt/
Now issue the command below.
sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386
This will change your root directory to be the LTSP clients root directory. In essence, anything you now do inside here, will be applied to the LTSP clients NFS root. This is a separate small set of files that are used to boot the clients into a usable, and enable them to contact the LTSP server. Once inside this shell, we must type the following command to obtain the latest list of packages from the apt servers.
mount -t proc proc /proc
apt-get update
You need to mount /proc in the chroot before beginning, as some
of the packages you install may need resources in /proc to install
correctly.
Once this has completed you will have to upgrade the software in the chroot by running the following command:
apt-get upgrade
After the upgrade is completed, don't forget to unmount /proc with:
umount /proc
Once you're done, you must leave the chroot by either typing exit or by using the key combination Ctrl+D. This will return you to the root of the server.
If your kernel has been upgraded you must run the LTSP kernel upgrade script, to ensure that your LTSP chroot uses the latest version. This is performed by running the command below:
sudo ltsp-update-kernels
All of your clients will now use the latest kernel upon their next reboot.
Finally, you must remember to rebuild the NBD boot image from your chroot with the following command:
sudo ltsp-update-image
Be advised that this may take a few minutes, depending on the speed of your server.
At some point in time, it may become necessary to change the IP address of your LTSP server. Normally this does not present an issue, but LTSP servers and clients communicate over and encrypted channel and require all SSL certificates to be updated. Without this update, no LTSP clients will be able to log in. This is done by simply opening a terminal and running the following command.
sudo ltsp-update-sshkeys