The Debian Edu /
-Skolelinux project have users all over the globe, but until
-recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
-country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
-this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
-to adjust and scale the just released
-Debian Edu
-Wheezy setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
-happy to share his answers with you here.
-
-
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
-
I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
-the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
-background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
-"folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
-Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
-in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
-just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
-perspective when working with IT.
-
-
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?
-
-I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
-now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
-time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
-a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
-K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
-seriously into Skolelinux instead.
-
-
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
-distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
-integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
-administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
-based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
-well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
-when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
-showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
-mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
-same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
-setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
-workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
-thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
-convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
-projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
-small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
-have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
-clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
-old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
-nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
-comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
-such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
-quicker to update.
-
-
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
-we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
-year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
-sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
-to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
-a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.
-
-
I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
-install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
-distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
-That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
-Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
-to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
-support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
-software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
-need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
-some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
-run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
-education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
-by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
-education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
-are done. This is important if you want to get a job.
-
-
Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
-magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
-market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
-world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
-to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
-are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
-edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
-there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
-
-
We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
-the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
-Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
-Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
-tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
-program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
-studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
-want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
-things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
-have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
-fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
-one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
-because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
-sound file.
-
-
So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
-will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
-they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
-look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
-programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
-as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
-program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
-learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
-the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.
-
-
Which free software do you use daily?
-
-
Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
-only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
-to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
-)
-
-
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-
To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
-source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
-it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
-flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
-will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
-students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
-clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
-idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
-the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
-open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
-problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
-will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
-support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
-desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
-level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.
-
-
Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
-useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
-article Radio station
-management with Airtime,
-Airtime which
-claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
-Rivendell which claim to
-be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
-useful to the aspiring radio producer.
+
+
6th December 2012
+
Where I work at the University of
+Oslo, we use the
+Cerebrum user
+administration system to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
+I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
+an XML-RPC API, but
+I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
+always use the bofh command line client at work. Until today. I want
+to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
+virtual machines. Here are a few notes on how to use it with
+Python.
+
+
I started by looking at the source of the Java
+bofh
+client, to figure out how it connected to the API server. I also
+googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
+a
+simple example in the XML-RPC howto.
+
+
This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
+commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
+user currently logged in:
+
+
+#!/usr/bin/env python
+import getpass
+import xmlrpclib
+server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
+username = getpass.getuser()
+password = getpass.getpass()
+server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
+#print server.get_commands(sessionid)
+sessionid = server.login(username, password)
+print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
+result = server.logout(sessionid)
+print result
+
+
+
Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
+and DHCP updates I wanted to do.
+