<channel>
<title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from April 2010</title>
<description>Entries from April 2010</description>
- <link>../../../</link>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
+ <item>
+ <title>Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
+Debian Edu. The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
+handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
+and go.</p>
+
+<p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
+Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
+example called Roaming Workstations. Here are my thought on this.
+The setup would consist of the following:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
+ the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
+ the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
+ server. This allow the user to work also when offline. The
+ central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
+ request, for example mounted via CIFS. It could be mounted
+ automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
+ and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
+ hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
+ request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
+ can be used to access it when needed. Perhaps it is enough to use
+ the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
+
+ <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
+ authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
+ to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
+ to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server. This can be done using
+ <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
+ or the Fedora developed
+ <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
+ Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
+
+ <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
+ using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
+ directory, using unison.</li>
+
+ <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
+ their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
+ the box with CUPS. For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
+ system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
+ implemented.</li>
+
+ <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
+ sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
+
+ <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
+ cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
+ local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
+the moment. If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
+in time for the Squeeze release to freeze. Some of the pieces need
+tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
+(<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
+perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
+its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
+when disconnected from the net. If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
+to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</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>Great book: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future"</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
+thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
+touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
+conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
+book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
+Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
+restrictions on the web, for example from
+<a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
+epub-version from
+<a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
+<a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
+strongly recommend this book.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</title>
- <link>../../../Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">../../../Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</guid>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
+ <description><p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux. Setting up a
Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Great book: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future"</title>
- <link>../../../Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">../../../Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
-thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
-touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
-conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
-book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
-Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
-restrictions on the web, for example from
-<a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
-epub-version from
-<a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
-<a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
-strongly recommend this book.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
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