-
One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
-create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
-change the password on the first login attempt.
-
-
I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
-Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account
-and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
-unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
-passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.
-
-
A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
-settings in /etc/shadow:
-
-
-root@tjener:~# chage -l test
-Last password change : May 02, 2010
-Password expires : never
-Password inactive : never
-Account expires : never
-Minimum number of days between password change : 0
-Maximum number of days between password change : 99999
-Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
-root@tjener:~#
-
-
-
The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
-account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
-lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
-to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it
-simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
-avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).
-
-
After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
-intended:
-
-
-root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
-root@tjener:~# chage -l test
-Last password change : Jan 02, 1970
-Password expires : never
-Password inactive : never
-Account expires : never
-Minimum number of days between password change : 0
-Maximum number of days between password change : 10950
-Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
-root@tjener:~#
-
-
-
So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
-Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
-user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).
-
-
Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
-sure only the user itself have the account password?
-
-
If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
-Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
-
-
Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
-shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
-last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
-on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
-I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on
-Squeeze, and 'chage -d 0 username' do work there. I have not
-tested it on Lenny yet.
-
-
Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
-equivalent command to expire a password is 'passwd -e
-username', which insert zero into the date of the last password
-change.
+
In the Debian
+popularity-contest numbers, the adobe-flashplugin package the
+second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
+most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
+working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the
+users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
+installed.
+
+
In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
+(«Skolelinux
+i bruk â Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
+stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs»), one of the most important problems
+schools experienced with Debian
+Edu/Skolelinux was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
+web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
+the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
+good reason to stay with Windows.
+
+
I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
+said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
+everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
+comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
+non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
+understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
+example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
+it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
+distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
+pages they want to visit.
+
+
This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
+and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
+distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
+Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
+to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
+the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
+unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
+The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
+release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
+with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
+accept the new package into Squeeze.