<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 2 May 2010 13:47:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
+ <description><p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 6 May 2010 23:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
+ <description><p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
to test your Squeeze system, make sure
</description>
</item>
+ <item>
+ <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><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>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><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>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><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>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 19:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><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>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Magnetstripeinnhold i billetter fra Flytoget og Hurtigruten</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Magnetstripeinnhold_i_billetter_fra_Flytoget_og_Hurtigruten.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Magnetstripeinnhold_i_billetter_fra_Flytoget_og_Hurtigruten.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2010 16:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>For en stund tilbake kjøpte jeg en magnetkortleser for å kunne
+titte på hva som er skrevet inn på magnetstripene til ulike kort. Har
+ikke hatt tid til å analysere mange kort så langt, men tenkte jeg
+skulle dele innholdet på to kort med mine lesere.</p>
+
+<p>For noen dager siden tok jeg flyet til Harstad og Hurtigruten til
+Bergen. Flytoget fra Oslo S til flyplassen ga meg en billett med
+magnetstripe. Påtrykket finner jeg følgende informasjon:</p>
+
+<pre>
+Flytoget Airport Express Train
+
+Fra - Til : Oslo Sentralstasjon
+Kategori : Voksen
+Pris : Nok 170,00
+Herav mva. 8,00% : NOK 12,59
+Betaling : Kontant
+Til - Fra : Oslo Lufthavn
+Utstedt: : 08.05.10
+Gyldig Fra-Til : 08.05.10-07.11.10
+Billetttype : Enkeltbillett
+
+102-1015-100508-48382-01-08
+</pre>
+
+<p>På selve magnetstripen er innholdet
+<tt>;E?+900120011=23250996541068112619257138248441708433322932704083389389062603279671261502492655?</tt>.
+Aner ikke hva innholdet representerer, og det er lite overlapp mellom
+det jeg ser trykket på billetten og det jeg ser av tegn i
+magnetstripen. Håper det betyr at de bruker kryptografiske metoder
+for å gjøre det vanskelig å forfalske billetter.</p>
+
+<p>Den andre billetten er fra Hurtigruten, der jeg mistenker at
+strekkoden på fronten er mer brukt enn magnetstripen (det var i hvert
+fall den biten vi stakk inn i dørlåsen).</p>
+
+<p>Påtrykket forsiden er følgende:</p>
+
+<pre>
+Romnummer 727
+Hurtigruten
+Midnatsol
+Reinholdtsen
+Petter
+Bookingno: SAX69 0742193
+Harstad-Bergen
+Dep: 09.05.2010 Arr: 12.05.2010
+Lugar fra Risøyhamn
+Kost: FRO=4
+</pre>
+
+<p>På selve magnetstripen er innholdet
+<tt>;1316010007421930=00000000000000000000?+E?</tt>. Heller ikke her
+ser jeg mye korrespondanse mellom påtrykk og magnetstripe.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
+found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
+working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
+definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
+
+<p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
+include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
+get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
+firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
+install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
+are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
+an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
+enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
+debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
+Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
+to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
+/cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
+found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
+going to work.</p>
+
+<p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
+look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
+the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
+packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
+"external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
+/cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
+solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
+look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
+provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
+to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
+Edu.</p>
+
+<p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
+activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
+hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
+run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
+license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
+solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
+contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
+The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
+issues are known and should be solved:
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>The wicd package seen to
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
+parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
+seem to be on the case.</li>
+
+<li>The nvidia X driver seem to
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
+triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
+maintainer is on the case.</li>
+
+<li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
+sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
+sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
+/etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
+sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
+workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
+sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
+solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
+some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
+which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
+
+<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>
+
+<p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
</channel>
</rss>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff