- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a></div>
- <div class="date"> 6th December 2013</div>
- <div class="body"><p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
-but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
-Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
-had a new school administrator show up on
-<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
-his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
-time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
-Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
-Germany a few years ago.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
-engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
-the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
-freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
-
-<p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
-from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
-projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
-system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
-<a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
-(a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
-<a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
-(Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
-system supporting various operating systems).</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
-coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
-source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
-introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<ul>
- <li>Quick installation,</li>
- <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
- <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
- <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
- single company,</li>
- <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
- experience and problem solutions.</li>
-</ul>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<ul>
- <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
- the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
- a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
- working again reliably.
-
- <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
- little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
- similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
- as their base.
-
- <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
- configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
- not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
- configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
- and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
- network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
-
- <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
- contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
- distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
- Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
- future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
- schemes.</li>
-
- <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
- compared to Debian.</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-<p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
-rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
-Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
-upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
-programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
-occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
-programming languages for teaching.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Strong arguments are</p>
-
-<ul>
-
- <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
- teaching and learning.</li>
-
- <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
- home, and at their working place without running into license or
- conversion problems.</li>
-
- <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
- than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
- customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
- science, not products.</li>
-
- <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
- would you need proprietary software for?</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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