- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a></div>
- <div class="date"> 4th June 2013</div>
- <div class="body"><p>It has been a while since my last English
-<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-interview last November. But the developers and translators are still
-pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
-time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
-in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
-professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
-mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
-probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
-
-<p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
-and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
-packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
-<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
-Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
-then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
-manual.
-
-<p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
-virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
-shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
-how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
-
-<p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
-ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
-by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>. What pleased
-me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
-there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
-to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
-artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
-<a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
-movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
-<a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
-
-<p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
-<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
-Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
-beautiful project.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
-community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
-fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
-
-<p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
-distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
-of educational free software.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
-project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
-not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
-solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
-is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
-
-<p>One can find support from a company by looking at
-<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
-wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
-companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
-Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
-for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
-consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
-support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
-most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
-scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
-also using the mathematical software
-<a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about">Scilab</a> and
-<a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html">Sage</a> (built from
-source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
-
-<p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
-using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
-statistics?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
-university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">R</a> and
-Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
-geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
-<a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig">kig</a> to do
-constructions in planar geometry
-
-<li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
-to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
-groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-<p>I like also
-<a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
-provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
-<a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>My suggestions would be to</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
-
-<li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
- well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
- OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
-
-<li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
-
-<li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
- system.</li>
-
-</ul>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a></div>
+ <div class="date">12th March 2014</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
+storing user home directories and data. The design for handling this
+in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
+to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
+the clients take care of the rest. I was reminded about the need to
+document this better when one of the customers of
+<a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
+on the board of directors, asked about how to do this. The steps to
+get this working are the following:</p>
+
+<p><ol>
+
+<li>Add new storage server in DNS. I use nas-server.intern as the
+example host here.</li>
+
+<li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
+all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
+
+<li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
+tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
+
+</ol></p>
+
+<p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here. Follow the
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
+in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
+started).</p>
+
+<p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
+relevant subnets or machines:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
+Export list for nas-server:
+/storage 10.0.0.0/8
+root@tjener:~#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
+/storage export. With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
+netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
+NFS access.</p>
+
+<p>The next step is to update LDAP. This can not be done using GOsa²,
+because it lack a module for automount. Instead, use ldapvi and add
+the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
+bottom of the document. The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
+wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
+need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+objectClass: automount
+cn: nas-server
+automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+
+add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+objectClass: top
+objectClass: automountMap
+ou: auto.nas-server
+
+add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+objectClass: automount
+cn: /
+automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
+tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
+directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
+
+<p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
+the storage server directly by just visiting the
+/tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
+workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
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