+
+
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.
+
+
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:
+
+
+
+ - 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?
+
+ - 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
+ libpam-ccreds
+ or the Fedora developed
+ System
+ Security Services Daemon packages.
+
+ - 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.
+
+ - 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.
+
+ - For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
+ sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.
+
+ - 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.
+
+
+
+
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
+(#566718) 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.
+
+
If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
+please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
+
+