blog/data/2010-07-25-edu-sso-smb.txt

   1 Title: One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu
   2 Tags: english, nuug, debian edu, sikkerhet
   3 Date: 2010-07-25 10:00
   4
   5 <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
   6 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
   7 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
   8 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
   9 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
  10
  11 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
  12 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
  13 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
  14 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
  15 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
  16 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
  17 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
  18
  19 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
  20 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
  21 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
  22 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
  23 up. :)</p>
  24
  25 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
  26 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
  27 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
  28
  29 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
  30 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
  31 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
  32 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
  33 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
  34 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
  35 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
  36 release another day.</p>
  37
  38 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
  39 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>