</div>
<div class="padding"></div>
+<div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2010-05-13 22:20
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="body">
+
+<p>The last few days a new boot system called
+<a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
+has been
+<a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
+
+to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
+with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
+<a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
+a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
+based boot system. Tollef is
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
+systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
+like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
+information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
+at the moment do not.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
+platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
+some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
+kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
+system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
+way forward.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time, based on the
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
+on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
+decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
+soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
+there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
+new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
+already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
+with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
+
+ </div>
+</div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+<div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2010-05-14 21:10
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="body">
+
+<p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
+system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
+network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
+central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
+also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
+MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
+to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
+
+<p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
+ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
+this on the collector host:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
+line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
+
+<p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
+addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
+machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
+tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
+written yet.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
+
+ </div>
+</div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+<div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2010-05-14 22:40
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="body">
+
+<p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
+Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
+Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
+expected, if I am to believe the
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
+on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
+with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
+remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
+detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
+The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
+version.</p>
+
+More information about
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
+based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
+currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
+problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+CONCURRENCY=none
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
+the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
+list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+ </div>
+</div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+<div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html">Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2010-05-19 19:00
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="body">
+
+<p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
+Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
+package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
+into unstable. The
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
+package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
+passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
+package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
+hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
+
+<p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
+roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
+nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
+which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
+for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
+#485282</a> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
+libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
+care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
+
+<p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
+at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
+problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
+package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
+find time to make sure the next release will include both the
+Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
+and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
+
+<p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
+LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
+when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
+cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
+memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
+libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
+directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
+be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
+with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
+to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
+on the home directory servers.</p>
+
+<p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
+message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
+is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
+message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
+a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
+type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
+please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
+
+ </div>
+</div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
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