blog/data/2010-08-03-edu-roaming.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo
   2 Tags: english, nuug, debian edu
   3 Date: 2010-08-03 23:30
   4
   5 <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
   6 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
   7 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
   8 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
   9 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
  10 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
  11 servers.</p>
  12
  13 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
  14 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
  15 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
  16 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
  17 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
  18 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
  19 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
  20 .uio.no.</p>
  21
  22 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
  23 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
  24 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
  25 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
  26 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
  27 university servers.</p>
  28
  29 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
  30 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
  31 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
  32 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
  33 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
  34 uses.</p>