This documents how to setup remote floppy access on an LTSP terminal equipped with a floppy drive.
You must have an LTSP terminal with a floppy drive installed as BIOS drive A:
You must be running LTSP version 3.0
You must have the MTOOLS suite installed. Your Linux distribution may have already have MTOOLS as a package that you can install. If not, you can find the MTOOLS suite at http://mtools.linux.lu
You must be running your LTSP terminal in GUI mode, not text mode or LOCAL_APPS mode.
There are two methods to install. If you are running a RedHat based Linux distribution (i.e., one that uses RPM for package management), you can download the ltsp_floppyd-3.0.0-0.i386.rpm, and install it with the command “rpm -i ltsp_floppyd-3.0.0-0.i386.rpm”. Please note that you must be root to do this. The second is to download the “ltsp_floppyd-3.0.tar.gz” file, and untar it with the command “tar xzvf ltsp_floppyd-3.0.tar.gz”. This will create a directory called “ltsp_floppyd”. As root, run the “install_floppyd” script in that directory.
In your lts.conf file, for any workstation that you want to enable access to the floppy on, you'll need to modify the entry for that workstation to look like the following:
[ws001]
...
RCFILE_01 = floppyd
For each user who needs access to the
floppy create a .mtoolsrc
file in your home directory
with the following line:
drive a: file="$DISPLAY"
remote 1.44m mformat_only
If everything up to now has gone well, you should be able to type the following with a diskette in the drive:
mdir a:
You should see a directory listing of what's on the diskette.
On the link http://www.core-coutainville.org/mfm/ you'll find a slick little graphical file manager which uses MTOOLS to manipulate floppy drives. It'll do a nice job of moving files to and from the floppy.
This is a quick hack that should allow remote floppy access. Once nbd (network block devices) fully support removeable media, this method of accessing a floppy becomes somewhat obsolete. However, for now, it's the most reliable method. If you have any comments or questions, you should be able to get a hold of me at sbalneav@legalaid.mb.ca
Cheers!
Scott