standalone installation of epoptes

[pappaspanos]

Hi. I am writing to you for a problem with epoptes. We have a school lab with 11 PCs, Intel E52xx with 1GB Ram, except 1 with 3GB. Because they are very old and we don't have a gigabit switch but 3-4 switches, the one connected to another, we decided to install Lubuntu 18.04 LTS in every computer adn we can say that they work quickly enough. The PC with 3GB Ram is the theacher's one and here we want to run epoptes. We followed the guide here -https://epoptes.org/installation/ - but we cannot see any client. I have to say that every PC has hostname like 3lab-pc1, 3lab-pc2 etc. and there is a root user with username USER. Furthermore, because we don't have static IPs I did those steps in every PC

If this works, then put that name in /etc/default/epoptes-client. On each client, run:
sudo nano /etc/default/epoptes-client
and replace the line that says
#SERVER=server
with
SERVER=epoptes-server.local

After you do (2) or (3), you should also fetch the epoptes certificate on each client:
sudo epoptes-client -c
And then you should restart the client:
sudo reboot

and i used the name 3lab-pc1.local for server.
can you give me any help? Thanks

[alkisg]

Hi Pano,

SERVER=epoptes-server.local
and i used the name 3lab-pc1.local for server.

These two names are supposed to match. So put SERVER=3lab-pc1.local, and then run epoptes-client -c, and then reboot.

[pappaspanos]

Hi Alkis. Thanks for your reply. I have done those steps you described but no result. Beside that I removed and reinstalled epoptes using the stable repository, as it is described here - https://epoptes.org/documentation/ppa/ - but I steel cannot see any client in server. Is there anything to do in server side, beside from installing epoptes and allowing users to launch the GUI with the command gpasswd -a username epoptes???

[alkisg]

Hi Panos,

no you don't need to do anything else in the server. You can verify that the epoptes service is running by issuing systemctl status epoptes. And you can verify that the certificates are fine by running ls -l /etc/epoptes.

The problem is in the clients. When you fetched the certificate, did it report success? What happens if you run ls -l /etc/epoptes in the clients, does server.crt have the same size as the one in the server? What happens if you run /usr/sbin/epoptes-client, does it mention that it properly connects? Do you then see it in the epoptes GUI on the server?

Btw, Greek schools have better support in http://alkisg.mysch.gr/steki/index.php?board=67.0.

[pappaspanos]

Hi Alkis. I have done all those you mentioned above and here are the results:

• when i'm running systemctl status epoptes it tells me it is loaded but Active:Failed
• when is rum the command ls -l /etc/epoptes the server.crt has the same size as the one in the server, 1939 bytes
• when i run the command sudo /usr/sbin/epoptes-client its seems to be ok, the last two line are
  DONE
  Successfully fetched certificate from 3lab-pc1.local:789

I cannot understand where is the problem???
i am attaching some printscreens in order to be more specific and maybe to guide me to find it.



Do you want me to move the conversation to the forum you mention?

[alkisg]

Hi Pano. In the clients, you're not supposed to have epoptes installed. You only need epoptes-client there. So, try these:

sudo -i
apt install epoptes-client
apt purge --auto-remove epoptes
epoptes-client -c
reboot

[alkisg]

Solved in IRC, closing.

[pappaspanos]

Alkis sorry to write so late, thanks a lot for your help. I thinks it's worth to mention that you solved the problem by declaring static IP to server and then putting that IP and the server name to /etc/hosts. Thanks again.

[alkisg]

Yeah the main problem in your system was that while ping epoptes-pc.local worked, getent hosts epoptes-pc.local didn't work.
That's a misconfiguration in your system, but we didn't take the time to see what caused that misconfiguration as it's not related to epoptes, so we just worked around it with the static IP.