-<p>De færreste er klar over at Skolelinux-prosjektet kom som et resultat
-av en avgjørelse på årsmøtet i
-<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> i 2000-06-29, der Håkon Wium
-Lie, da varamedlem i styret, tok på seg oppdraget om å starte et
-initiativ kalt "Teach the Teacher", som skulle være et initiativ for
-å få fri programvare og unix-lignende operativsystemer inn i Skolen.
-Tanken var at en måtte starte med lærerne for at ungene skulle få
-mulighet til å møte en bedre IT-hverdag. Jeg var tilstede på
-møtet, og hadde sans for ideen, men intet skjedde. På vårparten
-2001 ble det arrangert en demonstrasjon i anledning at First Tuesday
-hadde invitert Microsoft til et møte for å fortelle om fremtidens
-Internet. Dette provoserte endel av oss, og EFN og NUUG tok initiativ
-til å arrangere
-<a href="http://www.digi.no/60982/first-tuesday-mote-med-microsoft-protest">en
-demonstrasjon utenfor lokalene 2001-05-21</a>. Blant de som sto bak
-demonstrasjonen var Vidar Bakke fra NUUG og Håkon W. Lie fra EFN.
-Etter demonstrasjonen arrangerte Håkon en fest hjemme hos seg der alle
-som hadde vært aktive i demonstrasjonsplanlegging og gjennomføringen
-deltok. Før festen var jeg blitt lei av å vente på at Håkon skulle ta
-initiativ til "Teach the Teacher", og for å forsøke å få litt fremgang
-besteme jeg meg for å benytte anledningen hos Håkon til å snakke om
-behovet for å hjelpe skolene i gang med bedre datasystemer bestående
-av fri programvare og unix-lignende operativsystemer. Flere var
-interessert, og Knut Yrvin tenkte på ideen. Han
-<a href="http://developer.skolelinux.no/brev/2001-06-28-invitasjon-skolelinux.txt">ropte
-sammen</a> til et stiftelsesmøte i prosjektet i sin arbeidsgivers
-Objectwares lokaler ved Ullevål stadion 2001-07-02, og jeg ble med.
-Resten er historie. :)</p>
+<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>