-<p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
-people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
-could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
-funded
-<a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
-gathering</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
-of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
-issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
-asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
-upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.</p>
-
-<p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
-process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
-boot:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
-
-<li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
- clock is in UTC.</li>
-
-<li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
- <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
- based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
-<a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
-Villegas</a>.
-
-<p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
-unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
-from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
-declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
-where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
-using this.</p>
-
-<p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
-introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
-startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
-from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
-possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
-this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
-insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)</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>