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  12   <h1>
  13        <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  14
  15   </h1>
  16
  17  </div>
  18
  19  <p>Entries tagged "english".</p>
  20
  21
  22
  23
  24 <div class="entry">
  25  <div class="title">
  26  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
  27  </div>
  28  <div class="date">
  29   2008-11-25 00:10
  30  </div>
  31
  32  <div class="body">
  33
  34 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
  35 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
  36 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
  37 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
  38 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
  39 notes are available on
  40 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
  41 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
  42 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
  43 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
  44 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
  45 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
  46 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
  47 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
  48 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
  49
  50 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
  51 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
  52
  53  </div>
  54  <div class="tags">
  55
  56
  57
  58   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
  59
  60  </div>
  61 </div>
  62 <div class="padding"></div>
  63
  64 <div class="entry">
  65  <div class="title">
  66  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
  67  </div>
  68  <div class="date">
  69   2008-12-07 12:00
  70  </div>
  71
  72  <div class="body">
  73
  74 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
  75 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
  76 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
  77 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
  78 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
  79 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
  80 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
  81 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
  82
  83 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
  84 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
  85 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
  86 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
  87 of these cards.</p>
  88
  89  </div>
  90  <div class="tags">
  91
  92
  93
  94   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
  95
  96  </div>
  97 </div>
  98 <div class="padding"></div>
  99
 100 <div class="entry">
 101  <div class="title">
 102  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
 103  </div>
 104  <div class="date">
 105   2008-12-28 15:40
 106  </div>
 107
 108  <div class="body">
 109
 110 <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
 111 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
 112 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
 113 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
 114 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
 115 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
 116 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
 117 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
 118 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
 119 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
 120 source, sink and mixer applications and
 121 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
 122 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
 123 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
 124 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
 125 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
 126 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
 127 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
 128 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
 129 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
 130
 131 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
 132 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
 133 larger stick as well.</p>
 134
 135  </div>
 136  <div class="tags">
 137
 138
 139
 140   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 141
 142  </div>
 143 </div>
 144 <div class="padding"></div>
 145
 146 <div class="entry">
 147  <div class="title">
 148  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html">When web browser developers make a video player...</a>
 149  </div>
 150  <div class="date">
 151   2009-01-17 18:50
 152  </div>
 153
 154  <div class="body">
 155
 156 <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
 157 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
 158 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
 159 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
 160 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
 161 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
 162 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
 163 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
 164 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
 165 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
 166 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
 167 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
 168 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
 169 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
 170
 171 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
 172 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
 173 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
 174 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
 175 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
 176 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
 177 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
 178 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
 179 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
 180 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
 181 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
 182 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
 183 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
 184 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
 185 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
 186 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
 187 playing when the download is done.</p>
 188
 189 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
 190 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
 191 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
 192 too.</p>
 193
 194 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
 195 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
 196 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
 197 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
 198
 199  </div>
 200  <div class="tags">
 201
 202
 203
 204   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
 205
 206  </div>
 207 </div>
 208 <div class="padding"></div>
 209
 210 <div class="entry">
 211  <div class="title">
 212  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
 213  </div>
 214  <div class="date">
 215   2009-02-20 08:50
 216  </div>
 217
 218  <div class="body">
 219
 220 <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
 221 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
 222 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
 223 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
 224 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
 225 the "missing" computer.</p>
 226
 227 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
 228 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
 229 code blocks as defined in the
 230 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
 231 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
 232 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
 233 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
 234 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
 235 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
 236 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
 237 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
 238 codes.</p>
 239
 240 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
 241 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
 242 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
 243 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
 244 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
 245 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
 246
 247 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
 248 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
 249 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
 250 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
 251 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
 252 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
 253 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
 254 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
 255 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
 256 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
 257
 258 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
 259 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
 260 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
 261
 262  </div>
 263  <div class="tags">
 264
 265
 266
 267   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 268
 269  </div>
 270 </div>
 271 <div class="padding"></div>
 272
 273 <div class="entry">
 274  <div class="title">
 275  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</a>
 276  </div>
 277  <div class="date">
 278   2009-02-28 23:50
 279  </div>
 280
 281  <div class="body">
 282
 283 <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
 284 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
 285 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
 286 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
 287 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
 288 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
 289 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
 290 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
 291 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
 292 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
 293 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
 294 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
 295 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
 296 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
 297 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
 298 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
 299 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
 300 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
 301 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
 302 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
 303 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
 304 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
 305 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
 306 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
 307 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
 308 machine.</p>
 309
 310 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
 311 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
 312 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
 313 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
 314 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
 315 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
 316 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
 317
 318 <pre>
 319 use LWP::Simple;
 320 use POSIX;
 321 use WWW::Mechanize;
 322 use Date::Parse;
 323 [...]
 324 sub get_support_info {
 325     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
 326     my $str;
 327
 328     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
 329         # fetch website from Dell support
 330         my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
 331         my $webpage = get($url);
 332         return undef unless ($webpage);
 333
 334         my $daysleft = -1;
 335         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
 336         foreach my $line (@lines) {
 337             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
 338             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
 339             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
 340
 341             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
 342             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
 343             my $lastend = "";
 344             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
 345                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
 346
 347                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 348                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
 349                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 350                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
 351                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
 352                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
 353                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
 354             }
 355             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 356             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 357                 if ($lastend lt $today);
 358         }
 359     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
 360         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
 361         my $url =
 362             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
 363         $mech->get($url);
 364         my $fields = {
 365             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
 366             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
 367             'country' => 'NO',
 368             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
 369             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
 370         };
 371         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
 372                             fields      => $fields );
 373         # Next step is screen scraping
 374         my $content = $mech->content();
 375
 376         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
 377         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
 378         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
 379         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
 380
 381         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 382
 383         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
 384             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
 385                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
 386             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
 387             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 388                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
 389             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 390                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
 391
 392             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
 393
 394             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 395                 if ($end lt $today);
 396         }
 397     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
 398         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
 399         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
 400         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
 401             my $content =
 402                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
 403             if ($content) {
 404                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
 405                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
 406                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
 407                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
 408
 409                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
 410                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
 411
 412                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
 413
 414                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 415                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 416                     if ($end lt $today);
 417             }
 418         }
 419     }
 420     return $str;
 421 }
 422 </pre>
 423
 424 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
 425 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
 426 from dmidecode.</p>
 427
 428 <pre>
 429 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
 430                        "447707-B21");
 431 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
 432 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
 433                        "1234567");
 434 </pre>
 435
 436 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
 437 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
 438
 439 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
 440 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
 441 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
 442 do so.</p>
 443
 444  </div>
 445  <div class="tags">
 446
 447
 448
 449   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 450
 451  </div>
 452 </div>
 453 <div class="padding"></div>
 454
 455 <div class="entry">
 456  <div class="title">
 457  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
 458  </div>
 459  <div class="date">
 460   2009-03-29 20:30
 461  </div>
 462
 463  <div class="body">
 464
 465 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
 466 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
 467 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
 468 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
 469 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
 470 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
 471
 472 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
 473 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
 474 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
 475 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
 476 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
 477 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
 478 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
 479 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
 480 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
 481 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
 482 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
 483 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
 484 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
 485
 486 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
 487 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
 488 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
 489 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
 490
 491 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
 492 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
 493
 494 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
 495 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
 496 new IETF work group?</p>
 497
 498  </div>
 499  <div class="tags">
 500
 501
 502
 503   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 504
 505  </div>
 506 </div>
 507 <div class="padding"></div>
 508
 509 <div class="entry">
 510  <div class="title">
 511  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
 512  </div>
 513  <div class="date">
 514   2009-03-29 21:00
 515  </div>
 516
 517  <div class="body">
 518
 519 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
 520 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
 521 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
 522 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
 523 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
 524 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
 525 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
 526 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
 527 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
 528 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
 529 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
 530 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
 531 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
 532 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
 533 now. :)</p>
 534
 535  </div>
 536  <div class="tags">
 537
 538
 539
 540   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 541
 542  </div>
 543 </div>
 544 <div class="padding"></div>
 545
 546 <div class="entry">
 547  <div class="title">
 548  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
 549  </div>
 550  <div class="date">
 551   2009-03-30 11:50
 552  </div>
 553
 554  <div class="body">
 555
 556 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
 557 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
 558 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
 559 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
 560 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
 561 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
 562 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
 563 application.</p>
 564
 565 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
 566 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
 567 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
 568 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
 569 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
 570 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
 571 blocked from doing so.</p>
 572
 573 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
 574 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
 575 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
 576 requirements change.</p>
 577
 578 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
 579 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
 580 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
 581
 582  </div>
 583  <div class="tags">
 584
 585
 586
 587   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 588
 589  </div>
 590 </div>
 591 <div class="padding"></div>
 592
 593 <div class="entry">
 594  <div class="title">
 595  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
 596  </div>
 597  <div class="date">
 598   2009-04-05 10:00
 599  </div>
 600
 601  <div class="body">
 602
 603 <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
 604 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
 605 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
 606 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
 607 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
 608 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
 609 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
 610 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
 611
 612 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
 613 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
 614 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
 615   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
 616   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
 617
 618 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
 619 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
 620 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
 621 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
 622
 623 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
 624 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
 625 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
 626 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
 627
 628 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
 629 set -e
 630 URL="$1"
 631 SAVEFILE="$2"
 632 DURATION="$3"
 633 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
 634   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
 635   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
 636 pid=$!
 637 sleep $DURATION
 638 kill $pid
 639 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
 640
 641  </div>
 642  <div class="tags">
 643
 644
 645
 646   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 647
 648  </div>
 649 </div>
 650 <div class="padding"></div>
 651
 652 <div class="entry">
 653  <div class="title">
 654  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
 655  </div>
 656  <div class="date">
 657   2009-04-28 09:30
 658  </div>
 659
 660  <div class="body">
 661
 662 <p>Julien Blache
 663 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
 664 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
 665 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
 666 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
 667 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
 668 properties.</p>
 669
 670  </div>
 671  <div class="tags">
 672
 673
 674
 675   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 676
 677  </div>
 678 </div>
 679 <div class="padding"></div>
 680
 681 <div class="entry">
 682  <div class="title">
 683  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
 684  </div>
 685  <div class="date">
 686   2009-05-02 15:00
 687  </div>
 688
 689  <div class="body">
 690
 691 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
 692 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
 693 do not yet know them.</p>
 694
 695 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
 696 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
 697 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
 698 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
 699 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
 700 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
 701 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
 702 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
 703 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
 704 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
 705 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
 706
 707 <p>The second one is
 708 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
 709 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
 710 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
 711 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
 712 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
 713 and the company behind it is running
 714 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
 715 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
 716 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
 717 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
 718 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
 719 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
 720 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
 721 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
 722
 723 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
 724 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
 725 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
 726 surrounded by today.</p>
 727
 728  </div>
 729  <div class="tags">
 730
 731
 732
 733   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 734
 735  </div>
 736 </div>
 737 <div class="padding"></div>
 738
 739 <div class="entry">
 740  <div class="title">
 741  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
 742  </div>
 743  <div class="date">
 744   2009-06-24 21:40
 745  </div>
 746
 747  <div class="body">
 748
 749 <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
 750 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
 751 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
 752 funded
 753 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
 754 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
 755 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
 756 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
 757 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
 758 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
 759
 760 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
 761 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
 762 boot:</p>
 763
 764 <ul>
 765
 766 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
 767
 768 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
 769    clock is in UTC.</li>
 770
 771 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
 772    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
 773    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
 774
 775 </ul>
 776
 777 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
 778 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
 779 Villegas</a>.
 780
 781 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
 782 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
 783 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
 784 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
 785 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
 786 using this.</p>
 787
 788 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
 789 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
 790 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
 791 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
 792 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
 793 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
 794 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
 795
 796  </div>
 797  <div class="tags">
 798
 799
 800
 801   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 802
 803  </div>
 804 </div>
 805 <div class="padding"></div>
 806
 807 <div class="entry">
 808  <div class="title">
 809  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
 810  </div>
 811  <div class="date">
 812   2009-07-22 23:00
 813  </div>
 814
 815  <div class="body">
 816
 817 <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
 818 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
 819 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
 820 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
 821 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
 822 the package up to date.</p>
 823
 824 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
 825 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
 826 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
 827 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
 828 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
 829 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
 830 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
 831 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
 832 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
 833 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
 834 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
 835 working on the future release.</p>
 836
 837 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
 838 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
 839
 840  </div>
 841  <div class="tags">
 842
 843
 844
 845   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 846
 847  </div>
 848 </div>
 849 <div class="padding"></div>
 850
 851 <div class="entry">
 852  <div class="title">
 853  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
 854  </div>
 855  <div class="date">
 856   2009-07-27 23:50
 857  </div>
 858
 859  <div class="body">
 860
 861 <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
 862 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
 863 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
 864 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
 865 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
 866 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
 867 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
 868
 869 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
 870 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
 871 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
 872
 873  </div>
 874  <div class="tags">
 875
 876
 877
 878   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 879
 880  </div>
 881 </div>
 882 <div class="padding"></div>
 883
 884 <div class="entry">
 885  <div class="title">
 886  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
 887  </div>
 888  <div class="date">
 889   2009-08-08 14:00
 890  </div>
 891
 892  <div class="body">
 893
 894 <p>According to <a
 895 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
 896 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
 897 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
 898 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
 899 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
 900 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
 901 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
 902 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
 903 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
 904 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
 905
 906 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
 907 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
 908 seminar this autumn.</p>
 909
 910  </div>
 911  <div class="tags">
 912
 913
 914
 915   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 916
 917  </div>
 918 </div>
 919 <div class="padding"></div>
 920
 921 <div class="entry">
 922  <div class="title">
 923  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html">Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</a>
 924  </div>
 925  <div class="date">
 926   2009-08-12 15:50
 927  </div>
 928
 929  <div class="body">
 930
 931 <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
 932 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
 933 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
 934 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
 935
 936 <table>
 937 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
 938 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
 939 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
 940 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
 941 </table>
 942
 943 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
 944 got these numbers:</p>
 945
 946 <table>
 947 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
 948 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
 949 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
 950 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
 951 </table>
 952
 953 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
 954
 955 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
 956 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
 957 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
 958 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
 959 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
 960
 961
 962 <table>
 963 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
 964 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
 965 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
 966 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
 967 </table>
 968
 969 <p>And with 'site:no':
 970
 971 <table>
 972 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
 973 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
 974 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
 975 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
 976 </table>
 977
 978 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
 979 numbers.</p>
 980
 981  </div>
 982  <div class="tags">
 983
 984
 985
 986   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
 987
 988  </div>
 989 </div>
 990 <div class="padding"></div>
 991
 992 <div class="entry">
 993  <div class="title">
 994  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
 995  </div>
 996  <div class="date">
 997   2010-01-27 15:15
 998  </div>
 999
1000  <div class="body">
1001
1002 <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
1003 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
1004 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
1005 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
1006 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
1007 further.</p>
1008
1009 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
1010 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
1011 configured to be a server for the
1012 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
1013 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
1014 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
1015 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
1016 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
1017 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
1018 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
1019 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
1020 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
1021 and Nagios configuration.</p>
1022
1023 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
1024 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
1025 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
1026 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
1027
1028 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
1029 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
1030 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
1031 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
1032 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
1033 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
1034 the machine.</p>
1035
1036 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
1037 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
1038 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
1039 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
1040
1041 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
1042 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
1043 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
1044 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
1045 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
1046 everything is taken care of.</p>
1047
1048  </div>
1049  <div class="tags">
1050
1051
1052
1053   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
1054
1055  </div>
1056 </div>
1057 <div class="padding"></div>
1058
1059 <div class="entry">
1060  <div class="title">
1061  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html">Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues</a>
1062  </div>
1063  <div class="date">
1064   2010-02-11 17:15
1065  </div>
1066
1067  <div class="body">
1068
1069 <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
1070 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
1071 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
1072 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
1073 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
1074 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
1075 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
1076
1077 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
1078
1079 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
1080 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
1081 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
1082 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
1083
1084  </div>
1085  <div class="tags">
1086
1087
1088
1089   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1090
1091  </div>
1092 </div>
1093 <div class="padding"></div>
1094
1095 <div class="entry">
1096  <div class="title">
1097  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html">After 6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented</a>
1098  </div>
1099  <div class="date">
1100   2010-03-06 18:15
1101  </div>
1102
1103  <div class="body">
1104
1105 <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
1106 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
1107 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
1108 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
1109 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
1110 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
1111
1112 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
1113 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
1114 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
1115 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
1116
1117 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
1118 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
1119 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
1120 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
1121 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
1122 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
1123
1124  </div>
1125  <div class="tags">
1126
1127
1128
1129   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1130
1131  </div>
1132 </div>
1133 <div class="padding"></div>
1134
1135 <div class="entry">
1136  <div class="title">
1137  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
1138  </div>
1139  <div class="date">
1140   2010-04-14 17:20
1141  </div>
1142
1143  <div class="body">
1144
1145 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
1146 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
1147 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
1148 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
1149 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
1150 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
1151 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
1152 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
1153 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
1154
1155 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
1156 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
1157 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
1158 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
1159 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
1160
1161 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
1162 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
1163
1164 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
1165 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
1166 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
1167 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
1168 to work properly.</p>
1169
1170 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
1171 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
1172 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
1173 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
1174 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
1175 time.</p>
1176
1177 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
1178 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
1179 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
1180 up in a few days.</p>
1181
1182  </div>
1183  <div class="tags">
1184
1185
1186
1187   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1188
1189  </div>
1190 </div>
1191 <div class="padding"></div>
1192
1193 <div class="entry">
1194  <div class="title">
1195  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html">Great book: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future"</a>
1196  </div>
1197  <div class="date">
1198   2010-04-19 17:10
1199  </div>
1200
1201  <div class="body">
1202
1203 <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
1204 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
1205 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
1206 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
1207 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
1208 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
1209 restrictions on the web, for example from
1210 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
1211 epub-version from
1212 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
1213 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
1214 strongly recommend this book.</p>
1215
1216  </div>
1217  <div class="tags">
1218
1219
1220
1221   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1222
1223  </div>
1224 </div>
1225 <div class="padding"></div>
1226
1227 <div class="entry">
1228  <div class="title">
1229  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html">Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</a>
1230  </div>
1231  <div class="date">
1232   2010-04-28 20:40
1233  </div>
1234
1235  <div class="body">
1236
1237 <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
1238 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
1239 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
1240 and go.</p>
1241
1242 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
1243 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
1244 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
1245 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
1246
1247 <ul>
1248
1249  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
1250    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
1251    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
1252    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
1253    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
1254    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
1255    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
1256    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
1257    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
1258    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
1259    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
1260    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
1261
1262  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
1263    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
1264    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
1265    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
1266    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
1267    or the Fedora developed
1268    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
1269    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
1270
1271  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
1272    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
1273    directory, using unison.</li>
1274
1275  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
1276    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
1277    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
1278    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
1279    implemented.</li>
1280
1281  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
1282    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
1283
1284  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
1285    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
1286    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
1287
1288 </ul>
1289
1290 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
1291 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
1292 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
1293 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
1294 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
1295 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
1296 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
1297 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
1298 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
1299
1300 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
1301 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
1302
1303  </div>
1304  <div class="tags">
1305
1306
1307
1308   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1309
1310  </div>
1311 </div>
1312 <div class="padding"></div>
1313
1314 <div class="entry">
1315  <div class="title">
1316  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html">Forcing new users to change their password on first login</a>
1317  </div>
1318  <div class="date">
1319   2010-05-02 13:47
1320  </div>
1321
1322  <div class="body">
1323
1324 <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
1325 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
1326 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
1327
1328 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
1329 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
1330 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
1331 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
1332 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
1333
1334 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
1335 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
1336
1337 <blockquote><pre>
1338 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
1339 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
1340 Password expires                                        : never
1341 Password inactive                                       : never
1342 Account expires                                         : never
1343 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
1344 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
1345 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
1346 root@tjener:~#
1347 </pre></blockquote>
1348
1349 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
1350 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
1351 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
1352 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
1353 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
1354 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
1355
1356 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
1357 intended:</p>
1358
1359 <blockquote><pre>
1360 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
1361 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
1362 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
1363 Password expires                                        : never
1364 Password inactive                                       : never
1365 Account expires                                         : never
1366 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
1367 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
1368 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
1369 root@tjener:~#
1370 </pre></blockquote>
1371
1372 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
1373 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
1374 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
1375
1376 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
1377 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
1378
1379 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
1380 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
1381
1382 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
1383 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
1384 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
1385 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
1386 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
1387 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
1388 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
1389
1390 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
1391 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
1392 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
1393 change.</p>
1394
1395  </div>
1396  <div class="tags">
1397
1398
1399
1400   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1401
1402  </div>
1403 </div>
1404 <div class="padding"></div>
1405
1406 <div class="entry">
1407  <div class="title">
1408  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
1409  </div>
1410  <div class="date">
1411   2010-05-06 23:25
1412  </div>
1413
1414  <div class="body">
1415
1416 <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
1417 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
1418 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
1419 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
1420 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
1421 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
1422 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
1423
1424 <blockquote><pre>
1425 CONCURRENCY=makefile
1426 </pre></blockquote>
1427
1428 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
1429 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
1430 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
1431 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
1432 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
1433 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
1434 make this happen.</p>
1435
1436 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
1437 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
1438 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
1439 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
1440 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
1441
1442 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
1443 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
1444 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
1445 fix the remaining issues.</p>
1446
1447 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
1448 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
1449 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1450 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
1451
1452  </div>
1453  <div class="tags">
1454
1455
1456
1457   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1458
1459  </div>
1460 </div>
1461 <div class="padding"></div>
1462
1463 <div class="entry">
1464  <div class="title">
1465  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
1466  </div>
1467  <div class="date">
1468   2010-05-13 22:20
1469  </div>
1470
1471  <div class="body">
1472
1473 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
1474 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
1475 has been
1476 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
1477
1478 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
1479 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
1480 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
1481 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
1482 based boot system.  Tollef is
1483 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
1484 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
1485 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
1486 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
1487 at the moment do not.</p>
1488
1489 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
1490 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
1491 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
1492 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
1493 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
1494 way forward.</p>
1495
1496 <p>In the mean time, based on the
1497 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
1498 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
1499 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
1500 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
1501 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
1502 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
1503 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
1504 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
1505
1506  </div>
1507  <div class="tags">
1508
1509
1510
1511   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1512
1513  </div>
1514 </div>
1515 <div class="padding"></div>
1516
1517 <div class="entry">
1518  <div class="title">
1519  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
1520  </div>
1521  <div class="date">
1522   2010-05-14 21:10
1523  </div>
1524
1525  <div class="body">
1526
1527 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
1528 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
1529 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
1530 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
1531 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
1532 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
1533 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
1534 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
1535
1536 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
1537 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
1538 this on the collector host:</p>
1539
1540 <blockquote><pre>
1541 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
1542 </pre></blockquote>
1543
1544 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
1545 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
1546
1547 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
1548 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
1549 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
1550 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
1551 written yet.</p>
1552
1553  </div>
1554  <div class="tags">
1555
1556
1557
1558   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
1559
1560  </div>
1561 </div>
1562 <div class="padding"></div>
1563
1564 <div class="entry">
1565  <div class="title">
1566  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
1567  </div>
1568  <div class="date">
1569   2010-05-14 22:40
1570  </div>
1571
1572  <div class="body">
1573
1574 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
1575 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
1576 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
1577 expected, if I am to believe the
1578 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
1579 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
1580 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
1581 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
1582 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
1583 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
1584 version.</p>
1585
1586 More information about
1587 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
1588 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
1589 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
1590 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
1591
1592 <blockquote><pre>
1593 CONCURRENCY=none
1594 </pre></blockquote>
1595
1596 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
1597 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
1598 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1599 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
1600
1601  </div>
1602  <div class="tags">
1603
1604
1605
1606   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1607
1608  </div>
1609 </div>
1610 <div class="padding"></div>
1611
1612 <div class="entry">
1613  <div class="title">
1614  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html">Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</a>
1615  </div>
1616  <div class="date">
1617   2010-05-19 19:00
1618  </div>
1619
1620  <div class="body">
1621
1622 <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
1623 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
1624 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
1625 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
1626 into unstable.  The
1627 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
1628 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
1629 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
1630 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
1631 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
1632 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
1633 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
1634
1635 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
1636 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
1637 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
1638 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
1639 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
1640 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
1641 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
1642 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
1643
1644 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
1645 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
1646 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
1647 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
1648 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
1649 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
1650 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
1651
1652 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
1653 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
1654 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
1655 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
1656 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
1657 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
1658 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
1659 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
1660 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
1661 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
1662 on the home directory servers.</p>
1663
1664 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
1665 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
1666 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
1667 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
1668 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
1669 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
1670
1671 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
1672 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
1673
1674  </div>
1675  <div class="tags">
1676
1677
1678
1679   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1680
1681  </div>
1682 </div>
1683 <div class="padding"></div>
1684
1685 <div class="entry">
1686  <div class="title">
1687  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
1688  </div>
1689  <div class="date">
1690   2010-05-22 21:30
1691  </div>
1692
1693  <div class="body">
1694
1695 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
1696 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
1697 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
1698 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
1699
1700 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
1701 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
1702 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
1703 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
1704 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
1705 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
1706 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
1707 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
1708 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
1709 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
1710 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
1711 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
1712 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
1713 going to work.</p>
1714
1715 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
1716 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
1717 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
1718 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
1719 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
1720 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
1721 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
1722 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
1723 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
1724 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
1725 Edu.</p>
1726
1727 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
1728 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
1729 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
1730 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
1731 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
1732 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
1733
1734 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
1735 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
1736
1737  </div>
1738  <div class="tags">
1739
1740
1741
1742   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1743
1744  </div>
1745 </div>
1746 <div class="padding"></div>
1747
1748 <div class="entry">
1749  <div class="title">
1750  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
1751  </div>
1752  <div class="date">
1753   2010-05-27 23:55
1754  </div>
1755
1756  <div class="body">
1757
1758 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
1759 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
1760 issues are known and should be solved:
1761
1762 <p><ul>
1763
1764 <li>The wicd package seen to
1765 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
1766 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
1767 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
1768 seem to be on the case.</li>
1769
1770 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
1771 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
1772 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
1773 maintainer is on the case.</li>
1774
1775 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
1776 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
1777 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
1778 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
1779 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
1780 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
1781 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
1782 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
1783
1784 </ul></p>
1785
1786 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
1787 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
1788 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
1789 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
1790
1791 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
1792 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
1793 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1794 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
1795
1796 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
1797
1798  </div>
1799  <div class="tags">
1800
1801
1802
1803   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1804
1805  </div>
1806 </div>
1807 <div class="padding"></div>
1808
1809 <div class="entry">
1810  <div class="title">
1811  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
1812  </div>
1813  <div class="date">
1814   2010-06-01 17:05
1815  </div>
1816
1817  <div class="body">
1818
1819 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
1820 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
1821 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
1822 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
1823 wait.</p>
1824
1825 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
1826 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
1827 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
1828 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
1829 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
1830 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
1831
1832 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
1833 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
1834 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
1835 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
1836 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
1837 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
1838 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
1839 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
1840
1841 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
1842
1843  </div>
1844  <div class="tags">
1845
1846
1847
1848   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1849
1850  </div>
1851 </div>
1852 <div class="padding"></div>
1853
1854 <div class="entry">
1855  <div class="title">
1856  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
1857  </div>
1858  <div class="date">
1859   2010-06-03 12:05
1860  </div>
1861
1862  <div class="body">
1863
1864 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
1865 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
1866 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
1867 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
1868 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
1869
1870 <blockquote><pre>
1871 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
1872   vendor                    count
1873   Dell Computer Corporation     1
1874     PowerEdge 1750              1
1875   IBM                           1
1876     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
1877   Intel                         2
1878   [no-dmi-info]                 3
1879 maintainer:~#
1880 </pre></blockquote>
1881
1882 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
1883 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
1884 information listed with Intel as vendor and mo model, and virtual Xen
1885 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
1886 option to list the individual machines.</p>
1887
1888 <p>A larger list is
1889 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
1890 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
1891 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
1892 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
1893 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
1894 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
1895 collector.</p>
1896
1897  </div>
1898  <div class="tags">
1899
1900
1901
1902   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
1903
1904  </div>
1905 </div>
1906 <div class="padding"></div>
1907
1908 <div class="entry">
1909  <div class="title">
1910  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
1911  </div>
1912  <div class="date">
1913   2010-06-06 14:15
1914  </div>
1915
1916  <div class="body">
1917
1918 <p>Via the
1919 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
1920 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
1921 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
1922 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
1923 following the standards wars of today.</p>
1924
1925  </div>
1926  <div class="tags">
1927
1928
1929
1930   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1931
1932  </div>
1933 </div>
1934 <div class="padding"></div>
1935
1936 <div class="entry">
1937  <div class="title">
1938  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
1939  </div>
1940  <div class="date">
1941   2010-06-06 23:55
1942  </div>
1943
1944  <div class="body">
1945
1946 <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
1947 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
1948 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
1949 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
1950 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
1951 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
1952 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
1953
1954 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
1955 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
1956 COLUMNS):</p>
1957
1958 <blockquote><pre>
1959 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
1960 previous=N
1961 PREVLEVEL=
1962 RUNLEVEL=
1963 runlevel=S
1964 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
1965 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
1966 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
1967 </pre></blockquote>
1968
1969 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
1970 script.</p>
1971
1972 <blockquote><pre>
1973 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
1974 previous=N
1975 PREVLEVEL=N
1976 RUNLEVEL=S
1977 runlevel=S
1978 </pre></blockquote>
1979
1980 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
1981 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
1982 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
1983
1984 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
1985 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
1986 choice.</p>
1987
1988  </div>
1989  <div class="tags">
1990
1991
1992
1993   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1994
1995  </div>
1996 </div>
1997 <div class="padding"></div>
1998
1999 <div class="entry">
2000  <div class="title">
2001  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
2002  </div>
2003  <div class="date">
2004   2010-06-11 22:50
2005  </div>
2006
2007  <div class="body">
2008
2009 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
2010 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
2011 have been discovered and reported in the process
2012 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
2013 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
2014 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
2015 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
2016 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
2017
2018 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
2019 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
2020 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
2021 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
2022 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
2023 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
2024
2025 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
2026 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
2027 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
2028 is created.  The bug report
2029 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
2030 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
2031 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
2032 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
2033 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
2034 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
2035 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
2036 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
2037 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
2038 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
2039 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
2040 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
2041 Debian Squeeze.</p>
2042
2043 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
2044 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
2045 trick:</p>
2046
2047 <blockquote><pre>
2048 #!/bin/sh
2049 set -ex
2050
2051 if [ "$1" ] ; then
2052     desktop=$1
2053 else
2054     desktop=gnome
2055 fi
2056
2057 from=lenny
2058 to=squeeze
2059
2060 exec &lt; /dev/null
2061 unset LANG
2062 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
2063 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
2064 fuser -mv .
2065 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
2066 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
2067 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
2068 #!/bin/sh
2069 exit 101
2070 EOF
2071 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
2072 exit_cleanup() {
2073     umount $tmpdir/proc
2074 }
2075 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
2076 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
2077 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
2078
2079 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
2080
2081 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
2082 # to return the correct answers.
2083 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
2084     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
2085
2086 # Include the desktop and laptop task
2087 for test in desktop laptop ; do
2088     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
2089 #!/bin/sh
2090 exit 2
2091 EOF
2092     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
2093 done
2094
2095 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
2096 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
2097 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
2098 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
2099
2100 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
2101 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
2102 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
2103 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
2104 fuser -mv
2105 </pre></blockquote>
2106
2107 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
2108 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
2109 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
2110 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
2111 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
2112 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
2113
2114 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
2115 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
2116 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
2117 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
2118 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
2119 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
2120 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
2121
2122 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
2123 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
2124 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
2125 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
2126 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
2127 packages.</p>
2128
2129  </div>
2130  <div class="tags">
2131
2132
2133
2134   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2135
2136  </div>
2137 </div>
2138 <div class="padding"></div>
2139
2140 <div class="entry">
2141  <div class="title">
2142  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
2143  </div>
2144  <div class="date">
2145   2010-06-13 09:05
2146  </div>
2147
2148  <div class="body">
2149
2150 <p>My
2151 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
2152 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
2153 finally made the upgrade logs available from
2154 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
2155 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
2156 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
2157 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
2158
2159 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
2160 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
2161 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
2162 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
2163 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
2164 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
2165 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
2166 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
2167
2168 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
2169 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
2170 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
2171 too surprising.</p>
2172
2173 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
2174 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
2175 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
2176 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
2177 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
2178 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
2179 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
2180 continue.</p>
2181
2182 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
2183 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
2184   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
2185   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
2186   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
2187   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
2188   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
2189   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2190   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
2191   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
2192   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
2193   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
2194   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
2195   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
2196   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
2197   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
2198   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
2199   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
2200   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
2201   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
2202   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
2203   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
2204   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
2205   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
2206   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
2207   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
2208   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
2209   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
2210   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
2211   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
2212
2213 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
2214
2215 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
2216   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
2217   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
2218   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
2219   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
2220   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
2221   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
2222   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
2223   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
2224   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
2225   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
2226   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
2227   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
2228   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
2229   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
2230   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
2231   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
2232   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
2233   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
2234   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
2235   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
2236   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
2237   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
2238   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
2239   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
2240   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
2241   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
2242   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
2243   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
2244   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
2245   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
2246   zip</p>
2247
2248 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
2249
2250 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
2251   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
2252   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
2253   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
2254   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
2255   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
2256   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2257   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
2258   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
2259   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
2260   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
2261   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
2262   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
2263   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
2264   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
2265   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
2266   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
2267   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
2268   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
2269   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
2270   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
2271   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
2272   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
2273   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
2274   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
2275   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
2276   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
2277   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
2278
2279 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
2280 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
2281   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
2282   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
2283   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
2284   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
2285   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
2286   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
2287   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
2288   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
2289   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
2290   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
2291   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
2292   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
2293   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
2294   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
2295   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
2296   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
2297   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
2298   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
2299   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
2300   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
2301   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
2302   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
2303   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
2304   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
2305   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
2306   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
2307   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
2308   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
2309   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
2310   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
2311   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
2312   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
2313   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
2314   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
2315   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
2316   xulrunner-1.9</p>
2317
2318
2319  </div>
2320  <div class="tags">
2321
2322
2323
2324   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2325
2326  </div>
2327 </div>
2328 <div class="padding"></div>
2329
2330 <div class="entry">
2331  <div class="title">
2332  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
2333  </div>
2334  <div class="date">
2335   2010-06-13 11:40
2336  </div>
2337
2338  <div class="body">
2339
2340 <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
2341 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
2342 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
2343 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
2344 pages.</p>
2345
2346 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
2347 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
2348 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
2349 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
2350 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
2351 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
2352 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
2353 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
2354 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
2355 see how the project is doing.</p>
2356
2357 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
2358 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
2359 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
2360 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
2361 Windows.  This is great.</p>
2362
2363  </div>
2364  <div class="tags">
2365
2366
2367
2368   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
2369
2370  </div>
2371 </div>
2372 <div class="padding"></div>
2373
2374 <div class="entry">
2375  <div class="title">
2376  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
2377  </div>
2378  <div class="date">
2379   2010-06-16 14:55
2380  </div>
2381
2382  <div class="body">
2383
2384 <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
2385 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
2386 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
2387 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
2388 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
2389 this:
2390
2391 <blockquote><pre>
2392 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
2393 tasksel --new-install
2394 </pre></blockquote>
2395
2396 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
2397 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
2398 any output what so ever.
2399
2400 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
2401 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
2402 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
2403 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
2404 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
2405 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
2406 code like this:
2407
2408 <blockquote><pre>
2409 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
2410 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
2411 $cmd
2412 </pre></blockquote>
2413
2414 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
2415 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
2416 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
2417 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
2418 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
2419 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
2420 installation.</p>
2421
2422 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
2423 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
2424 like this.</p>
2425
2426  </div>
2427  <div class="tags">
2428
2429
2430
2431   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2432
2433  </div>
2434 </div>
2435 <div class="padding"></div>
2436
2437 <div class="entry">
2438  <div class="title">
2439  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
2440  </div>
2441  <div class="date">
2442   2010-06-24 00:35
2443  </div>
2444
2445  <div class="body">
2446
2447 <p>A while back, I
2448 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
2449 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
2450 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
2451 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
2452
2453 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
2454 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
2455 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
2456 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
2457
2458 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
2459 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
2460 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
2461 Debian Edu.</p>
2462
2463 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
2464 the
2465 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
2466 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
2467 available today from IETF.</p>
2468
2469 <pre>
2470 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
2471 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
2472 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
2473  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
2474         NAME 'dhcpHost'
2475         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
2476 -       SUP top
2477 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
2478         MUST cn
2479         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
2480         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
2481 </pre>
2482
2483 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
2484 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
2485 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
2486
2487 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2488 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2489
2490  </div>
2491  <div class="tags">
2492
2493
2494
2495   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2496
2497  </div>
2498 </div>
2499 <div class="padding"></div>
2500
2501 <div class="entry">
2502  <div class="title">
2503  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
2504  </div>
2505  <div class="date">
2506   2010-06-28 00:30
2507  </div>
2508
2509  <div class="body">
2510
2511 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
2512 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
2513 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
2514 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
2515 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
2516 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
2517 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
2518 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
2519 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
2520 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
2521
2522 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
2523 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
2524 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
2525 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
2526 released.</p>
2527
2528 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
2529 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
2530 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
2531 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
2532
2533 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
2534 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2535
2536 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
2537 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
2538 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
2539 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
2540 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
2541
2542  </div>
2543  <div class="tags">
2544
2545
2546
2547   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2548
2549  </div>
2550 </div>
2551 <div class="padding"></div>
2552
2553 <div class="entry">
2554  <div class="title">
2555  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html">Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</a>
2556  </div>
2557  <div class="date">
2558   2010-07-01 11:40
2559  </div>
2560
2561  <div class="body">
2562
2563 <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
2564 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
2565 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
2566 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
2567 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
2568 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
2569 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
2570 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
2571 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
2572
2573 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
2574
2575 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
2576 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
2577 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
2578 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
2579 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
2580 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
2581 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
2582 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
2583 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
2584 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
2585 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
2586 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
2587 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
2588 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
2589 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
2590
2591 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
2592
2593 <blockquote><pre>
2594 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
2595 </pre></blockquote>
2596
2597 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
2598 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
2599 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
2600 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
2601 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
2602 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
2603 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
2604 on how to get this working.</p>
2605
2606 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
2607 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
2608 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
2609 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
2610 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
2611 instructions I found in the
2612 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
2613 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
2614
2615 <blockquote><pre>
2616         debug-level             0
2617         reload-count            unlimited
2618         paranoia                no
2619
2620         enable-cache            passwd          yes
2621         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
2622         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
2623         suggested-size          passwd          211
2624         check-files             passwd          yes
2625         persistent              passwd          yes
2626         shared                  passwd          yes
2627         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
2628         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
2629
2630         enable-cache            group           yes
2631         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
2632         negative-time-to-live   group           20
2633         suggested-size          group           211
2634         check-files             group           yes
2635         persistent              group           yes
2636         shared                  group           yes
2637         max-db-size             group           33554432
2638         auto-propagate          group           yes
2639
2640         enable-cache            hosts           no
2641         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
2642         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
2643         suggested-size          hosts           211
2644         check-files             hosts           yes
2645         persistent              hosts           yes
2646         shared                  hosts           yes
2647         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
2648
2649         enable-cache            services        yes
2650         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
2651         negative-time-to-live   services        20
2652         suggested-size          services        211
2653         check-files             services        yes
2654         persistent              services        yes
2655         shared                  services        yes
2656         max-db-size             services        33554432
2657 </pre></blockquote>
2658
2659 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
2660 automatically like the one provided in
2661 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
2662 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
2663 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
2664 look like this:</p>
2665
2666 <blockquote><pre>
2667 passwd:         files ldap
2668 group:          files ldap
2669 shadow:         files ldap
2670 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
2671 networks:       files
2672 protocols:      files
2673 services:       files
2674 ethers:         files
2675 rpc:            files
2676 netgroup:       files ldap
2677 </pre></blockquote>
2678
2679 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
2680 shadow and netgroup.</p>
2681
2682 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
2683 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
2684 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
2685 attributes cached.
2686
2687 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
2688   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
2689
2690 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
2691 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
2692 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
2693 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
2694 discovered sssd.</p>
2695
2696 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
2697
2698 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
2699 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
2700 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
2701 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
2702 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
2703 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
2704 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
2705 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
2706 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
2707 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
2708 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
2709 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
2710 version 1.2 is now in testing.
2711
2712 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
2713 roaming setup I want</p>
2714
2715 <blockquote><pre>
2716 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
2717 </pre></blockquote>
2718
2719 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
2720 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
2721
2722 <blockquote><pre>
2723 [sssd]
2724 config_file_version = 2
2725 reconnection_retries = 3
2726 sbus_timeout = 30
2727 services = nss, pam
2728 domains = INTERN
2729
2730 [nss]
2731 filter_groups = root
2732 filter_users = root
2733 reconnection_retries = 3
2734
2735 [pam]
2736 reconnection_retries = 3
2737
2738 [domain/INTERN]
2739 enumerate = false
2740 cache_credentials = true
2741
2742 id_provider = ldap
2743 auth_provider = ldap
2744 chpass_provider = ldap
2745
2746 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
2747 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2748 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
2749 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
2750 </pre></blockquote>
2751
2752 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
2753 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
2754
2755 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
2756 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
2757 modify it manually.</p>
2758
2759 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2760 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2761
2762  </div>
2763  <div class="tags">
2764
2765
2766
2767   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2768
2769  </div>
2770 </div>
2771 <div class="padding"></div>
2772
2773 <div class="entry">
2774  <div class="title">
2775  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
2776  </div>
2777  <div class="date">
2778   2010-07-03 23:55
2779  </div>
2780
2781  <div class="body">
2782
2783 <p>Here is a short update on my <a
2784 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
2785 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
2786 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
2787 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
2788 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
2789 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
2790 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
2791
2792 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
2793 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
2794 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
2795 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
2796 publish the difference.</p>
2797
2798 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
2799
2800 <blockquote><p>
2801   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2802   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
2803   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
2804   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2805   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
2806   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
2807   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
2808   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
2809 </p></blockquote>
2810
2811 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
2812
2813 <blockquote><p>
2814   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
2815   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
2816   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
2817   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
2818   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
2819   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
2820   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2821   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
2822   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
2823   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
2824   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
2825   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
2826   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
2827   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
2828   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
2829   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
2830   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
2831   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
2832   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
2833   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
2834 </p></blockquote>
2835
2836 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
2837
2838 <blockquote><p>
2839   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
2840   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
2841   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2842   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
2843   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
2844   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
2845   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
2846   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
2847   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
2848   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
2849   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
2850   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
2851   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
2852   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
2853   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
2854   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
2855   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
2856   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
2857   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
2858   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
2859   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
2860 </p></blockquote>
2861
2862 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
2863
2864 <blockquote><p>
2865   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
2866   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
2867   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
2868 </p></blockquote>
2869
2870 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
2871 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
2872 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
2873 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
2874 the difference somewhat.
2875
2876  </div>
2877  <div class="tags">
2878
2879
2880
2881   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2882
2883  </div>
2884 </div>
2885 <div class="padding"></div>
2886
2887 <div class="entry">
2888  <div class="title">
2889  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
2890  </div>
2891  <div class="date">
2892   2010-07-09 12:55
2893  </div>
2894
2895  <div class="body">
2896
2897 <p>Since
2898 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
2899 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
2900 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
2901 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
2902 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
2903 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
2904 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
2905 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
2906 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
2907 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
2908 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
2909 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
2910 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
2911
2912  </div>
2913  <div class="tags">
2914
2915
2916
2917   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2918
2919  </div>
2920 </div>
2921 <div class="padding"></div>
2922
2923 <div class="entry">
2924  <div class="title">
2925  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
2926  </div>
2927  <div class="date">
2928   2010-07-11 22:00
2929  </div>
2930
2931  <div class="body">
2932
2933 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
2934 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
2935 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
2936 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
2937
2938 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
2939 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
2940 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
2941 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
2942 LTSP clients.</p>
2943
2944 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
2945 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
2946 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
2947
2948 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
2949 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
2950 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
2951
2952 <blockquote><pre>
2953 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
2954 #
2955 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
2956 #
2957 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
2958 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
2959 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
2960 #
2961 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
2962 # existence of attribute names.
2963 #
2964 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
2965 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
2966 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
2967 #
2968 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
2969 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
2970 #
2971 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
2972 #     SUP top
2973 #     AUXILIARY
2974 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
2975
2976 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
2977 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
2978     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
2979     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
2980         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
2981         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
2982             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
2983             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
2984             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
2985             # bass value on to clients
2986             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
2987         done
2988     done
2989 fi
2990 </pre></blockquote>
2991
2992 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
2993 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
2994 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
2995 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
2996 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
2997
2998 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2999 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
3000
3001 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
3002 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
3003 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
3004 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
3005 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
3006 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
3007
3008  </div>
3009  <div class="tags">
3010
3011
3012
3013   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3014
3015  </div>
3016 </div>
3017 <div class="padding"></div>
3018
3019 <div class="entry">
3020  <div class="title">
3021  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
3022  </div>
3023  <div class="date">
3024   2010-07-14 23:45
3025  </div>
3026
3027  <div class="body">
3028
3029 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
3030 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
3031 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
3032 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
3033 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
3034
3035 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
3036 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
3037
3038 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
3039 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
3040 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
3041 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
3042 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
3043 to a slave DNS server.</p>
3044
3045 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
3046 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
3047 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
3048 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
3049 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
3050 seem to work.</p>
3051
3052 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
3053 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
3054 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
3055 this:</p>
3056
3057 <blockquote><pre>
3058   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3059   cn: hostname
3060   objectClass: dhcphost
3061   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3062   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
3063   associateddomain: hostname.intern
3064   arecord: 10.11.12.13
3065   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
3066   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
3067   ldapconfigsound: Y
3068 </pre></blockquote>
3069
3070 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
3071 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
3072 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
3073 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
3074
3075 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
3076 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
3077 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
3078 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
3079 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
3080 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
3081 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
3082 might be a good place to put it.</p>
3083
3084 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3085 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
3086
3087  </div>
3088  <div class="tags">
3089
3090
3091
3092   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3093
3094  </div>
3095 </div>
3096 <div class="padding"></div>
3097
3098 <div class="entry">
3099  <div class="title">
3100  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
3101  </div>
3102  <div class="date">
3103   2010-07-17 21:00
3104  </div>
3105
3106  <div class="body">
3107
3108 <p>This is a
3109 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
3110 on my
3111 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
3112 work</a> on
3113 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
3114 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
3115
3116 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
3117 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
3118 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
3119 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
3120
3121 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
3122 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
3123 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
3124
3125 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
3126
3127 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
3128 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
3129 the web.
3130
3131 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
3132 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
3133 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
3134 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
3135 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
3136 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
3137
3138 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
3139 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
3140 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
3141 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
3142 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
3143 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
3144 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
3145 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
3146 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
3147 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
3148 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
3149 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
3150 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
3151 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
3152 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
3153 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
3154
3155 <blockquote><pre>
3156 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3157   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3158   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3159   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3160   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3161   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3162   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3163
3164 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3165   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3166   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
3167   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
3168   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
3169   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
3170 </pre></blockquote>
3171
3172 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
3173 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
3174 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
3175 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3176 also exist.</p>
3177
3178 <blockquote><pre>
3179 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3180 objectclass: top
3181 objectclass: dnsdomain
3182 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3183 dc: tjener
3184 arecord: 10.0.2.2
3185 associateddomain: tjener.intern
3186
3187 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3188 objectclass: top
3189 objectclass: dnsdomain2
3190 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3191 dc: 2
3192 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
3193 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
3194 </pre></blockquote>
3195
3196 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
3197 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
3198 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
3199 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
3200 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
3201 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
3202 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
3203 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
3204 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
3205 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
3206 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
3207 instead.</p>
3208
3209 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
3210 like this:</p>
3211
3212 <blockquote><pre>
3213 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3214   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3215   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3216   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3217   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3218   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3219
3220 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3221   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
3222 </pre></blockquote>
3223
3224 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
3225 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
3226 reverse lookups.</p>
3227
3228 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
3229 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
3230 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
3231 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
3232
3233 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
3234 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
3235 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
3236
3237 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
3238 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
3239 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
3240 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
3241 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
3242
3243 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
3244 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
3245 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
3246 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
3247 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
3248
3249 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
3250 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
3251 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
3252 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
3253 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
3254 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
3255
3256 <blockquote><pre>
3257 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
3258     SUP top
3259     AUXILIARY
3260     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
3261           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
3262           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
3263           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
3264           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
3265     ))
3266 </pre></blockquote>
3267
3268 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
3269 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
3270 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
3271 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
3272 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
3273 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
3274
3275 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
3276
3277 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
3278 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
3279 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
3280 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
3281 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
3282
3283 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
3284 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
3285 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
3286 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
3287
3288 <blockquote><pre>
3289 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
3290 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
3291 </pre></blockquote>
3292
3293 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
3294 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
3295 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
3296 search result is this entry:</p>
3297
3298 <blockquote><pre>
3299 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3300 cn: dhcp
3301 objectClass: top
3302 objectClass: dhcpServer
3303 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3304 </pre></blockquote>
3305
3306 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
3307 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
3308 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
3309 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
3310 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
3311 The search result is this entry:</p>
3312
3313 <blockquote><pre>
3314 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3315 cn: DHCP Config
3316 objectClass: top
3317 objectClass: dhcpService
3318 objectClass: dhcpOptions
3319 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3320 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
3321 dhcpStatements: authoritative
3322 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
3323 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
3324 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
3325 </pre></blockquote>
3326
3327 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
3328 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
3329 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
3330 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
3331 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
3332 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
3333 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
3334 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
3335 related computer objects.</p>
3336
3337 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
3338 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
3339 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
3340 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
3341 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
3342 like:</p>
3343
3344 <blockquote><pre>
3345 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3346 cn: hostname
3347 objectClass: top
3348 objectClass: dhcpHost
3349 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
3350 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
3351 </pre></blockquote>
3352
3353 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
3354 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
3355 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
3356 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
3357 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
3358 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
3359 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
3360 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
3361 structural object class.
3362
3363 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
3364
3365 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
3366 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
3367 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
3368 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
3369 in the configuration.</p>
3370
3371 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
3372 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
3373 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
3374 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
3375 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
3376 structure.</p>
3377
3378 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
3379 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
3380
3381 <blockquote><pre>
3382 ou=services
3383   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
3384     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
3385     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3386       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3387         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3388     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3389       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3390         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3391     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
3392       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
3393 </pre></blockquote>
3394
3395 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
3396 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
3397 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
3398 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
3399
3400 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
3401 like this:</p>
3402
3403 <blockquote><pre>
3404 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3405 dc: hostname
3406 objectClass: top
3407 objectClass: dhcpHost
3408 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3409 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
3410 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3411 arecord: 10.11.12.13
3412 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
3413 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
3414 </pre></blockquote>
3415
3416 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
3417 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
3418 auxiliary object class.</p>
3419
3420  </div>
3421  <div class="tags">
3422
3423
3424
3425   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3426
3427  </div>
3428 </div>
3429 <div class="padding"></div>
3430
3431 <div class="entry">
3432  <div class="title">
3433  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html">OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page</a>
3434  </div>
3435  <div class="date">
3436   2010-07-18 16:45
3437  </div>
3438
3439  <div class="body">
3440
3441 <p>Thanks to
3442 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
3443 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
3444 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
3445 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
3446 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
3447 only available from the development server, until more experience is
3448 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
3449
3450 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
3451 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
3452 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
3453 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
3454 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
3455 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
3456 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
3457
3458  </div>
3459  <div class="tags">
3460
3461
3462
3463   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3464
3465  </div>
3466 </div>
3467 <div class="padding"></div>
3468
3469 <div class="entry">
3470  <div class="title">
3471  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html">One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</a>
3472  </div>
3473  <div class="date">
3474   2010-07-25 10:00
3475  </div>
3476
3477  <div class="body">
3478
3479 <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
3480 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
3481 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
3482 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
3483 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
3484
3485 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
3486 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
3487 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
3488 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
3489 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
3490 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
3491 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
3492
3493 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
3494 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
3495 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
3496 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
3497 up. :)</p>
3498
3499 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
3500 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
3501 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
3502
3503 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
3504 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
3505 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
3506 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
3507 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
3508 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
3509 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
3510 release another day.</p>
3511
3512 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
3513 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
3514
3515  </div>
3516  <div class="tags">
3517
3518
3519
3520   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3521
3522  </div>
3523 </div>
3524 <div class="padding"></div>
3525
3526 <div class="entry">
3527  <div class="title">
3528  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html">First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released</a>
3529  </div>
3530  <div class="date">
3531   2010-07-27 17:45
3532  </div>
3533
3534  <div class="body">
3535
3536 <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
3537 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
3538 completed.</p>
3539
3540 <blockquote>
3541 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
3542 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
3543 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
3544 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
3545 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
3546 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
3547 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
3548 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
3549
3550 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
3551 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
3552 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
3553
3554 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
3555 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
3556 much.</p>
3557
3558 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
3559
3560 <ul>
3561 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
3562 <ul>
3563   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
3564          combination with some new artwork
3565   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
3566   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
3567   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
3568   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
3569   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
3570   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
3571   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
3572   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
3573   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
3574 </ul></li>
3575 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
3576     Enabled for:
3577 <ul>
3578   <li>PAM
3579   <li>LDAP
3580   <li>IMAP
3581   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
3582 </ul>
3583 </li>
3584 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
3585 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
3586     fetched from LDAP.</li>
3587 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
3588 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
3589 </ul>
3590 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
3591
3592 <ul>
3593 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
3594     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
3595     for testing.</li>
3596 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
3597     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
3598     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
3599 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
3600 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
3601 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
3602 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
3603     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
3604 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
3605     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
3606     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
3607 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
3608     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
3609     and help out with translations.</li>
3610 </ul>
3611
3612 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
3613
3614 <ul>
3615 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
3616 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
3617 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
3618 </ul>
3619 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
3620
3621 <ul>
3622 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
3623 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
3624 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
3625 </ul>
3626
3627 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
3628 get closer to the final release.</p>
3629
3630 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
3631
3632 <ul>
3633 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
3634 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
3635 </ul>
3636
3637 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
3638 <ul>
3639 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
3640 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
3641 </ul>
3642 <p>How to report bugs:
3643 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
3644
3645 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
3646 </blockquote>
3647
3648  </div>
3649  <div class="tags">
3650
3651
3652
3653   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3654
3655  </div>
3656 </div>
3657 <div class="padding"></div>
3658
3659 <div class="entry">
3660  <div class="title">
3661  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
3662  </div>
3663  <div class="date">
3664   2010-07-27 23:50
3665  </div>
3666
3667  <div class="body">
3668
3669 <p>I discovered this while doing
3670 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
3671 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
3672 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
3673 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
3674 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
3675
3676 <p>An example is from todays
3677 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
3678 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
3679 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
3680 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
3681 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
3682 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
3683 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
3684
3685 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
3686
3687 <blockquote><pre>
3688 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
3689  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
3690   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
3691 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
3692  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
3693 </pre></blockquote>
3694
3695 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
3696 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
3697 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
3698 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
3699 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
3700 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
3701 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
3702 of dependency loops.</p>
3703
3704 <p>Thanks to
3705 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
3706 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
3707 dependencies
3708 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
3709 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
3710
3711 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
3712 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
3713 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
3714 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
3715 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
3716 it.</p>
3717
3718  </div>
3719  <div class="tags">
3720
3721
3722
3723   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3724
3725  </div>
3726 </div>
3727 <div class="padding"></div>
3728
3729 <div class="entry">
3730  <div class="title">
3731  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</a>
3732  </div>
3733  <div class="date">
3734   2010-08-03 23:30
3735  </div>
3736
3737  <div class="body">
3738
3739 <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
3740 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
3741 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
3742 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
3743 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
3744 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
3745 servers.</p>
3746
3747 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
3748 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
3749 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
3750 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
3751 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
3752 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
3753 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
3754 .uio.no.</p>
3755
3756 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
3757 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
3758 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
3759 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
3760 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
3761 university servers.</p>
3762
3763 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
3764 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
3765 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
3766 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
3767 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
3768 uses.</p>
3769
3770  </div>
3771  <div class="tags">
3772
3773
3774
3775   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3776
3777  </div>
3778 </div>
3779 <div class="padding"></div>
3780
3781 <div class="entry">
3782  <div class="title">
3783  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html">Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</a>
3784  </div>
3785  <div class="date">
3786   2010-08-07 14:45
3787  </div>
3788
3789  <div class="body">
3790
3791 <p>A few days ago, I
3792 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
3793 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
3794 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
3795 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
3796 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
3797 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
3798 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
3799 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
3800 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
3801
3802 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
3803 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
3804 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
3805 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
3806 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
3807 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
3808 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
3809 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
3810 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
3811 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
3812 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
3813 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
3814 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
3815 gave it a IP address.</p>
3816
3817 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
3818 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
3819 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
3820 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
3821 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
3822 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
3823 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
3824 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
3825
3826 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
3827 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
3828 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
3829 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
3830 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
3831 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
3832
3833 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
3834 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
3835 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
3836 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
3837 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
3838 with UID and GID values.</p>
3839
3840 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
3841 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
3842
3843  </div>
3844  <div class="tags">
3845
3846
3847
3848   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3849
3850  </div>
3851 </div>
3852 <div class="padding"></div>
3853
3854 <div class="entry">
3855  <div class="title">
3856  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</a>
3857  </div>
3858  <div class="date">
3859   2010-08-08 21:20
3860  </div>
3861
3862  <div class="body">
3863
3864 <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
3865 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
3866 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
3867 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
3868 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
3869 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
3870 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
3871
3872 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
3873 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
3874 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
3875 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
3876 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
3877 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
3878 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
3879
3880 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
3881 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
3882 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
3883 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
3884 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
3885
3886 <pre>
3887 /*
3888  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
3889  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
3890  * directory.
3891  * License: GPL v2 or later
3892  *
3893  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
3894  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
3895 */
3896
3897 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
3898 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
3899 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
3900
3901 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
3902
3903 #include &lt;errno.h>
3904 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
3905 #include &lt;stdio.h>
3906 #include &lt;string.h>
3907 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
3908 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
3909 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
3910 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
3911 #include &lt;unistd.h>
3912
3913 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
3914 /*
3915  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
3916  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
3917  * below.
3918  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
3919  */
3920 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
3921 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
3922   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
3923 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
3924   char *zErrMsg;
3925   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
3926   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
3927   unlink(name);
3928   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
3929   if( rc ){
3930     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
3931     sqlite3_close(db);
3932     return -1;
3933   }
3934
3935   /* create tables */
3936   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
3937   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
3938     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
3939     sqlite3_close(db);
3940     return -1;
3941   }
3942   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
3943   sqlite3_close(db);
3944   return 0;
3945 }
3946 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
3947
3948 /*
3949  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
3950  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
3951  * done in the sqlite3 library.
3952  * See also
3953  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
3954  * POSIX specification
3955  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
3956  */
3957 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
3958   struct flock fl;
3959   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
3960   unlink(name);
3961   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
3962   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
3963
3964   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
3965   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
3966   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
3967   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
3968   fl.l_len    = 1;
3969   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
3970   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3971
3972   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
3973   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
3974   fl.l_len    = 510;
3975   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
3976   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3977
3978   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
3979   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
3980   fl.l_len    = 1;
3981   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
3982   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3983
3984   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
3985   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
3986   fl.l_len    = 1;
3987   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
3988   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3989
3990   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
3991   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
3992   fl.l_len    = 510;
3993   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3994
3995   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
3996   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
3997   fl.l_len    = 2;
3998   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
3999   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
4000
4001   close(fd);
4002   return 0;
4003 }
4004
4005 /*
4006  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
4007  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
4008  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
4009  * slowing down file operations.
4010  */
4011 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
4012 #define LEVELS 5
4013   char *path = strdup("test");
4014   char *dirs[LEVELS];
4015   int level;
4016   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
4017   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
4018     char *newpath = NULL;
4019     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
4020       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
4021              path, strerror(errno));
4022       break;
4023     }
4024     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
4025     free(path);
4026     path = newpath;
4027   }
4028   return 0;
4029 }
4030
4031 /*
4032  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
4033  * KDE.
4034  */
4035 int test_symlinks(void) {
4036   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
4037   unlink("symlink");
4038   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
4039     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
4040   return 0;
4041 }
4042
4043 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
4044   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
4045   test_symlinks();
4046   test_subdirectory_creation();
4047 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
4048   test_sqlite_open();
4049 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
4050   test_gcompris_locking();
4051   return 0;
4052 }
4053 </pre>
4054
4055 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
4056 this:</p>
4057
4058 <pre>
4059 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
4060 info: testing symlink creation
4061 info: testing subdirectory creation
4062 info: sqlite worked
4063 info: testing fcntl locking
4064   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
4065   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
4066   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
4067   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
4068   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
4069   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
4070 </pre>
4071
4072 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
4073 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
4074 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
4075 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
4076 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
4077 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
4078 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
4079 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
4080
4081 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
4082 it. :)</p>
4083
4084 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
4085 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
4086 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
4087
4088  </div>
4089  <div class="tags">
4090
4091
4092
4093   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4094
4095  </div>
4096 </div>
4097 <div class="padding"></div>
4098
4099 <div class="entry">
4100  <div class="title">
4101  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
4102  </div>
4103  <div class="date">
4104   2010-08-09 20:15
4105  </div>
4106
4107  <div class="body">
4108
4109 <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
4110 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
4111 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
4112 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
4113 generated configuration.</p>
4114
4115 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
4116 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
4117 without any manual configuration.</p>
4118
4119 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
4120 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
4121 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
4122 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
4123 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
4124 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
4125 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
4126 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
4127 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
4128 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
4129 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
4130 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
4131 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
4132 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
4133 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
4134 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
4135 use.</p>
4136
4137 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
4138 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
4139 working properly out of the box:</p>
4140
4141 <ul>
4142 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
4143 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
4144 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
4145 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
4146 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
4147 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
4148 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
4149 </ul>
4150
4151 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
4152
4153 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
4154 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
4155 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
4156 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
4157 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
4158
4159 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
4160 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
4161 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
4162 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
4163 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
4164 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
4165 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
4166 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
4167
4168 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
4169 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
4170 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
4171 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
4172 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
4173 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
4174 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
4175 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
4176 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
4177 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
4178 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
4179 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
4180 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
4181 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
4182 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
4183 current DNS domain is used.</p>
4184
4185 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
4186 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
4187 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
4188 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
4189 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
4190 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
4191 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
4192 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
4193 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
4194 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
4195 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
4196 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
4197 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
4198
4199 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
4200 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
4201 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
4202 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
4203 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
4204 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
4205 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
4206 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
4207 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
4208 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
4209 do for now. :)</p>
4210
4211 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
4212 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
4213 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
4214 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
4215 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
4216 yet.</p>
4217
4218 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
4219 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
4220
4221 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
4222 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
4223 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
4224 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
4225
4226  </div>
4227  <div class="tags">
4228
4229
4230
4231   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4232
4233  </div>
4234 </div>
4235 <div class="padding"></div>
4236
4237 <div class="entry">
4238  <div class="title">
4239  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
4240  </div>
4241  <div class="date">
4242   2010-08-15 22:20
4243  </div>
4244
4245  <div class="body">
4246
4247 <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
4248 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
4249 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
4250 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
4251 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
4252 long time.</p>
4253
4254  </div>
4255  <div class="tags">
4256
4257
4258
4259   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
4260
4261  </div>
4262 </div>
4263 <div class="padding"></div>
4264
4265 <div class="entry">
4266  <div class="title">
4267  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
4268  </div>
4269  <div class="date">
4270   2010-08-26 13:30
4271  </div>
4272
4273  <div class="body">
4274
4275 <p>My file system sematics program
4276 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
4277 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
4278 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
4279 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
4280 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
4281 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
4282 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
4283 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
4284 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
4285 script:</p>
4286
4287 <pre>
4288 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
4289   mode_t retval = 0;
4290   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
4291   if (-1 != fd) {
4292     unlink(name);
4293     struct stat statbuf;
4294     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
4295       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
4296     }
4297     close(fd);
4298   }
4299   return retval;
4300 }
4301
4302 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
4303 int test_umask(void) {
4304   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
4305
4306   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
4307   mode_t newmode;
4308   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
4309     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
4310            newmode);
4311   }
4312   umask(007);
4313   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
4314     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
4315            newmode);
4316   }
4317
4318   umask (orig_umask);
4319   return 0;
4320 }
4321
4322 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
4323   [...]
4324   test_umask();
4325   return 0;
4326 }
4327 </pre>
4328
4329 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
4330
4331 <pre>
4332 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
4333 info: testing symlink creation
4334 info: testing subdirectory creation
4335 info: testing fcntl locking
4336   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
4337   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
4338   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
4339   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
4340   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
4341   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
4342 info: testing umask effect on file creation
4343 </pre>
4344
4345 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
4346 result:</p>
4347
4348 <pre>
4349 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
4350 info: testing symlink creation
4351 info: testing subdirectory creation
4352 info: testing fcntl locking
4353   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
4354   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
4355   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
4356   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
4357   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
4358   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
4359 info: testing umask effect on file creation
4360   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
4361   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
4362 </pre>
4363
4364 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
4365 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
4366 directory.</p>
4367
4368 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
4369 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
4370
4371 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
4372 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
4373 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
4374
4375  </div>
4376  <div class="tags">
4377
4378
4379
4380   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4381
4382  </div>
4383 </div>
4384 <div class="padding"></div>
4385
4386 <div class="entry">
4387  <div class="title">
4388  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
4389  </div>
4390  <div class="date">
4391   2010-08-30 19:30
4392  </div>
4393
4394  <div class="body">
4395
4396 <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
4397 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
4398 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
4399 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
4400 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
4401 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
4402 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
4403
4404 <pre>
4405 % ln foo bar
4406 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
4407 %
4408 </pre>
4409
4410 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
4411 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
4412 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
4413 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
4414 nevertheless. :)</p>
4415
4416 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
4417 git from
4418 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
4419
4420  </div>
4421  <div class="tags">
4422
4423
4424
4425   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4426
4427  </div>
4428 </div>
4429 <div class="padding"></div>
4430
4431 <div class="entry">
4432  <div class="title">
4433  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html">My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</a>
4434  </div>
4435  <div class="date">
4436   2010-09-01 21:00
4437  </div>
4438
4439  <div class="body">
4440
4441 <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
4442 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
4443 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
4444 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
4445 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
4446 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
4447 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
4448 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
4449 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
4450 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
4451 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
4452 drive around.</p>
4453
4454 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
4455 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
4456
4457 <p><pre>
4458 use Spykee;
4459 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
4460 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
4461 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
4462 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
4463 $spykee->left();
4464 sleep 2;
4465 $spykee->right();
4466 sleep 2;
4467 $spykee->forward();
4468 sleep 2;
4469 $spykee->back();
4470 sleep 2;
4471 $spykee->stop();
4472 </pre></p>
4473
4474 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
4475 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
4476 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
4477 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
4478 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
4479 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
4480 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
4481 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
4482 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
4483 going. :).</p>
4484
4485 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
4486 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
4487 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
4488 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
4489
4490  </div>
4491  <div class="tags">
4492
4493
4494
4495   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4496
4497  </div>
4498 </div>
4499 <div class="padding"></div>
4500
4501 <div class="entry">
4502  <div class="title">
4503  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
4504  </div>
4505  <div class="date">
4506   2010-09-04 10:10
4507  </div>
4508
4509  <div class="body">
4510
4511 <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
4512 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
4513 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
4514 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
4515 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
4516 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
4517 installed.</p>
4518
4519 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
4520 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
4521 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
4522 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
4523 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
4524 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
4525 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
4526 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
4527 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
4528
4529 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
4530 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
4531 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
4532 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
4533 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
4534 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
4535 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
4536 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
4537 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
4538 pages they want to visit.</p>
4539
4540 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
4541 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
4542 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
4543 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
4544 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
4545 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
4546 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
4547 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
4548 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
4549 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
4550 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
4551
4552  </div>
4553  <div class="tags">
4554
4555
4556
4557   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4558
4559  </div>
4560 </div>
4561 <div class="padding"></div>
4562
4563 <div class="entry">
4564  <div class="title">
4565  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS 130 digital camera</a>
4566  </div>
4567  <div class="date">
4568   2010-09-09 23:55
4569  </div>
4570
4571  <div class="body">
4572
4573 <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
4574 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
4575 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
4576 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
4577 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
4578 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
4579 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
4580 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
4581 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
4582
4583 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
4584 written:</p>
4585
4586 <blockquote>
4587 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
4588 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
4589 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
4590 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
4591 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
4592
4593 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
4594 standard.</p>
4595 </blockquote>
4596
4597 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
4598 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
4599 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
4600 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
4601
4602 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
4603 read
4604 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
4605 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
4606 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
4607 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
4608 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
4609 the issue.  The solution is to support the
4610 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
4611 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
4612 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
4613
4614  </div>
4615  <div class="tags">
4616
4617
4618
4619   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4620
4621  </div>
4622 </div>
4623 <div class="padding"></div>
4624
4625 <div class="entry">
4626  <div class="title">
4627  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
4628  </div>
4629  <div class="date">
4630   2010-10-03 22:30
4631  </div>
4632
4633  <div class="body">
4634
4635 <p><ul>
4636
4637 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars">There
4638 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
4639
4640 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
4641 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
4642 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
4643
4644 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
4645 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
4646 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
4647 simple setup.
4648
4649 </ul></p>
4650
4651  </div>
4652  <div class="tags">
4653
4654
4655
4656   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4657
4658  </div>
4659 </div>
4660 <div class="padding"></div>
4661
4662 <div class="entry">
4663  <div class="title">
4664  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html">First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot</a>
4665  </div>
4666  <div class="date">
4667   2010-10-09 14:00
4668  </div>
4669
4670  <div class="body">
4671
4672 <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
4673 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
4674 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
4675 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
4676 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
4677 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
4678 robots.</p>
4679
4680 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
4681 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
4682 a few less important features too.</p>
4683
4684 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
4685 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
4686 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
4687 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
4688
4689 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
4690 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
4691 source or binary package:</p>
4692
4693 <p><ul>
4694 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz</a></li>
4695 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc</a></li>
4696 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb</a></li>
4697 </ul></p>
4698
4699 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
4700 please let me know.</p>
4701
4702  </div>
4703  <div class="tags">
4704
4705
4706
4707   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4708
4709  </div>
4710 </div>
4711 <div class="padding"></div>
4712
4713 <div class="entry">
4714  <div class="title">
4715  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html">Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support</a>
4716  </div>
4717  <div class="date">
4718   2010-10-19 14:45
4719  </div>
4720
4721  <div class="body">
4722
4723 <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
4724 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
4725 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
4726 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
4727 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
4728 AVM2 flash files.</p>
4729
4730 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
4731 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
4732 following text:</P>
4733
4734 <p><blockquote>
4735
4736   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
4737   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
4738
4739   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
4740
4741   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
4742
4743   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
4744   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
4745   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
4746   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
4747   days. The project web page is available from
4748   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
4749   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
4750   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
4751
4752   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
4753   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
4754   to get this to happen.</p>
4755
4756   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
4757   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
4758
4759 </blockquote></p>
4760
4761 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
4762 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
4763 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
4764 :)</p>
4765
4766  </div>
4767  <div class="tags">
4768
4769
4770
4771   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4772
4773  </div>
4774 </div>
4775 <div class="padding"></div>
4776
4777 <div class="entry">
4778  <div class="title">
4779  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
4780  </div>
4781  <div class="date">
4782   2010-10-24 22:45
4783  </div>
4784
4785  <div class="body">
4786
4787 <p>Some updates.</p>
4788
4789 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
4790 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
4791 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
4792 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
4793 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
4794 :)</p>
4795
4796 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
4797 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
4798 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
4799 It is called
4800 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
4801 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
4802 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
4803 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
4804 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
4805 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
4806
4807 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
4808 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
4809 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
4810 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
4811 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
4812 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
4813 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
4814 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
4815 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
4816 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
4817
4818  </div>
4819  <div class="tags">
4820
4821
4822
4823   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4824
4825  </div>
4826 </div>
4827 <div class="padding"></div>
4828
4829 <div class="entry">
4830  <div class="title">
4831  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html">Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD</a>
4832  </div>
4833  <div class="date">
4834   2010-11-07 11:45
4835  </div>
4836
4837  <div class="body">
4838
4839 <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
4840 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
4841 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
4842 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
4843 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
4844 working using this DVD.</p>
4845
4846 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
4847 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
4848 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
4849 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
4850 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
4851 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
4852 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
4853
4854 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
4855 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
4856 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
4857 Debian archive.</p>
4858
4859 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
4860 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
4861 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
4862 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
4863 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
4864 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
4865 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
4866 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
4867 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
4868 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
4869 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
4870 free X driver should work.</p>
4871
4872 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
4873 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
4874 DVD more useful again.</p>
4875
4876  </div>
4877  <div class="tags">
4878
4879
4880
4881   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4882
4883  </div>
4884 </div>
4885 <div class="padding"></div>
4886
4887 <div class="entry">
4888  <div class="title">
4889  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
4890  </div>
4891  <div class="date">
4892   2010-11-09 16:10
4893  </div>
4894
4895  <div class="body">
4896
4897 <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
4898
4899 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
4900 3D linked in from
4901 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
4902 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
4903
4904  </div>
4905  <div class="tags">
4906
4907
4908
4909   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4910
4911  </div>
4912 </div>
4913 <div class="padding"></div>
4914
4915 <div class="entry">
4916  <div class="title">
4917  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
4918  </div>
4919  <div class="date">
4920   2010-11-20 07:20
4921  </div>
4922
4923  <div class="body">
4924
4925 <p>Answering
4926 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
4927 call from the Gnash project</a> for
4928 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
4929 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
4930 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
4931 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
4932 releases out more often.</p>
4933
4934 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
4935 I have considered setting up a <a
4936 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
4937 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
4938 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
4939 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
4940 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
4941 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
4942 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
4943 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
4944 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
4945 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
4946 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
4947 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
4948
4949  </div>
4950  <div class="tags">
4951
4952
4953
4954   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4955
4956  </div>
4957 </div>
4958 <div class="padding"></div>
4959
4960 <div class="entry">
4961  <div class="title">
4962  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
4963  </div>
4964  <div class="date">
4965   2010-11-20 22:50
4966  </div>
4967
4968  <div class="body">
4969
4970 <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
4971 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
4972 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
4973 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
4974
4975 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
4976 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
4977 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
4978
4979 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
4980
4981 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
4982
4983 <blockquote><p>
4984   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
4985   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
4986   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
4987   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
4988   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
4989   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
4990   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
4991   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
4992   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
4993   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
4994   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
4995   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
4996   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
4997   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
4998   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
4999   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
5000   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
5001   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
5002   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
5003   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
5004   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
5005   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
5006   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
5007   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
5008   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
5009   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
5010   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
5011   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
5012   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
5013   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
5014   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
5015   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
5016   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
5017   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
5018   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
5019   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
5020   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
5021   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
5022   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
5023   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
5024   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
5025   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
5026   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
5027   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
5028   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
5029   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
5030   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
5031   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
5032   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
5033   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
5034   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
5035   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
5036   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
5037   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
5038   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
5039   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
5040   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
5041   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
5042   zip
5043 </p></blockquote>
5044
5045 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
5046
5047 <blockquote><p>
5048   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
5049   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
5050   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
5051   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
5052   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
5053   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
5054   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
5055   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
5056   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
5057   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
5058   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
5059   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
5060   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
5061   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
5062   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
5063   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
5064   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
5065   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
5066   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
5067   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
5068   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
5069   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
5070   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
5071   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
5072   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
5073   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
5074   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
5075   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
5076   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
5077 </p></blockquote>
5078
5079 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
5080
5081 <blockquote><p>
5082   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
5083 </p></blockquote>
5084
5085 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
5086
5087 <blockquote><p>
5088 [nothing]
5089 </p></blockquote>
5090
5091 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
5092
5093 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
5094
5095 <blockquote><p>
5096   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
5097   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
5098   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
5099   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
5100   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
5101   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
5102   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
5103   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
5104   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
5105   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
5106   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
5107   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
5108   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
5109   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
5110   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
5111   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
5112   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
5113   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
5114   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
5115   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
5116   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
5117   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
5118   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
5119   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
5120   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
5121   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
5122   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
5123   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
5124   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
5125   ttf-sazanami-gothic
5126 </p></blockquote>
5127
5128 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
5129
5130 <blockquote><p>
5131   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
5132   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
5133   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
5134   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
5135   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
5136   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
5137   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
5138   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
5139   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
5140   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
5141   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
5142   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
5143   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
5144   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
5145   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
5146   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
5147   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
5148   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
5149   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
5150   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
5151   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
5152   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
5153   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
5154   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
5155   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
5156   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
5157   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
5158   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
5159   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
5160   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
5161   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
5162   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
5163   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
5164 </p></blockquote>
5165
5166 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
5167
5168 <blockquote><p>
5169   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
5170   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
5171   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
5172   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
5173   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
5174   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
5175   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
5176 </p></blockquote>
5177
5178 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
5179
5180 <blockquote><p>
5181   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
5182 </p></blockquote>
5183
5184  </div>
5185  <div class="tags">
5186
5187
5188
5189   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5190
5191  </div>
5192 </div>
5193 <div class="padding"></div>
5194
5195 <div class="entry">
5196  <div class="title">
5197  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
5198  </div>
5199  <div class="date">
5200   2010-11-22 11:20
5201  </div>
5202
5203  <div class="body">
5204
5205 <p>Most of the computers in use by the
5206 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
5207 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
5208 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
5209 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
5210 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
5211 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
5212 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
5213 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
5214
5215 <p>I found
5216 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
5217 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
5218 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
5219 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
5220 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
5221 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
5222
5223 <pre>
5224 #!/bin/sh
5225
5226 # Based on
5227 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
5228
5229 set -e
5230 set -x
5231
5232 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
5233     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
5234     exit 1
5235 else
5236     host="$1"
5237 fi
5238
5239 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
5240     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
5241     exit 1
5242 fi
5243
5244 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
5245 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
5246 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
5247 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
5248
5249 img=$host.img
5250 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
5251 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
5252
5253 parted $img mklabel msdos
5254 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
5255 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
5256 parted $img set 1 boot on
5257
5258 modprobe dm-mod
5259 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
5260 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
5261
5262 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
5263 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
5264 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
5265
5266 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
5267 losetup -d /dev/loop0
5268 </pre>
5269
5270 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
5271 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
5272
5273 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
5274 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
5275 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
5276 seem to work just fine.</p>
5277
5278  </div>
5279  <div class="tags">
5280
5281
5282
5283   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5284
5285  </div>
5286 </div>
5287 <div class="padding"></div>
5288
5289 <div class="entry">
5290  <div class="title">
5291  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
5292  </div>
5293  <div class="date">
5294   2010-11-22 14:15
5295  </div>
5296
5297  <div class="body">
5298
5299 <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
5300 upgrade testing of the
5301 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
5302 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
5303 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
5304 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
5305
5306 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
5307
5308 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
5309
5310 <blockquote><p>
5311   apache2.2-bin
5312   aptdaemon
5313   baobab
5314   binfmt-support
5315   browser-plugin-gnash
5316   cheese-common
5317   cli-common
5318   cups-pk-helper
5319   dmz-cursor-theme
5320   empathy
5321   empathy-common
5322   freedesktop-sound-theme
5323   freeglut3
5324   gconf-defaults-service
5325   gdm-themes
5326   gedit-plugins
5327   geoclue
5328   geoclue-hostip
5329   geoclue-localnet
5330   geoclue-manual
5331   geoclue-yahoo
5332   gnash
5333   gnash-common
5334   gnome
5335   gnome-backgrounds
5336   gnome-cards-data
5337   gnome-codec-install
5338   gnome-core
5339   gnome-desktop-environment
5340   gnome-disk-utility
5341   gnome-screenshot
5342   gnome-search-tool
5343   gnome-session-canberra
5344   gnome-system-log
5345   gnome-themes-extras
5346   gnome-themes-more
5347   gnome-user-share
5348   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
5349   gstreamer0.10-tools
5350   gtk2-engines
5351   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
5352   gtk2-engines-smooth
5353   hamster-applet
5354   libapache2-mod-dnssd
5355   libapr1
5356   libaprutil1
5357   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
5358   libaprutil1-ldap
5359   libart2.0-cil
5360   libboost-date-time1.42.0
5361   libboost-python1.42.0
5362   libboost-thread1.42.0
5363   libchamplain-0.4-0
5364   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
5365   libcheese-gtk18
5366   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
5367   libcryptui0
5368   libdiscid0
5369   libelf1
5370   libepc-1.0-2
5371   libepc-common
5372   libepc-ui-1.0-2
5373   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
5374   libfreerdp0
5375   libgconf2.0-cil
5376   libgdata-common
5377   libgdata7
5378   libgdu-gtk0
5379   libgee2
5380   libgeoclue0
5381   libgexiv2-0
5382   libgif4
5383   libglade2.0-cil
5384   libglib2.0-cil
5385   libgmime2.4-cil
5386   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
5387   libgnome2.24-cil
5388   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
5389   libgpod-common
5390   libgpod4
5391   libgtk2.0-cil
5392   libgtkglext1
5393   libgtksourceview2.0-common
5394   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
5395   libmono-addins0.2-cil
5396   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
5397   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
5398   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
5399   libmono-posix2.0-cil
5400   libmono-security2.0-cil
5401   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
5402   libmono-system2.0-cil
5403   libmtp8
5404   libmusicbrainz3-6
5405   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
5406   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
5407   libopal3.6.8
5408   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
5409   libpt2.6.7
5410   libpython2.6
5411   librpm1
5412   librpmio1
5413   libsdl1.2debian
5414   libsrtp0
5415   libssh-4
5416   libtelepathy-farsight0
5417   libtelepathy-glib0
5418   libtidy-0.99-0
5419   media-player-info
5420   mesa-utils
5421   mono-2.0-gac
5422   mono-gac
5423   mono-runtime
5424   nautilus-sendto
5425   nautilus-sendto-empathy
5426   p7zip-full
5427   pkg-config
5428   python-aptdaemon
5429   python-aptdaemon-gtk
5430   python-axiom
5431   python-beautifulsoup
5432   python-bugbuddy
5433   python-clientform
5434   python-coherence
5435   python-configobj
5436   python-crypto
5437   python-cupshelpers
5438   python-elementtree
5439   python-epsilon
5440   python-evolution
5441   python-feedparser
5442   python-gdata
5443   python-gdbm
5444   python-gst0.10
5445   python-gtkglext1
5446   python-gtksourceview2
5447   python-httplib2
5448   python-louie
5449   python-mako
5450   python-markupsafe
5451   python-mechanize
5452   python-nevow
5453   python-notify
5454   python-opengl
5455   python-openssl
5456   python-pam
5457   python-pkg-resources
5458   python-pyasn1
5459   python-pysqlite2
5460   python-rdflib
5461   python-serial
5462   python-tagpy
5463   python-twisted-bin
5464   python-twisted-conch
5465   python-twisted-core
5466   python-twisted-web
5467   python-utidylib
5468   python-webkit
5469   python-xdg
5470   python-zope.interface
5471   remmina
5472   remmina-plugin-data
5473   remmina-plugin-rdp
5474   remmina-plugin-vnc
5475   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
5476   rhythmbox-plugins
5477   rpm-common
5478   rpm2cpio
5479   seahorse-plugins
5480   shotwell
5481   software-center
5482   system-config-printer-udev
5483   telepathy-gabble
5484   telepathy-mission-control-5
5485   telepathy-salut
5486   tomboy
5487   totem
5488   totem-coherence
5489   totem-mozilla
5490   totem-plugins
5491   transmission-common
5492   xdg-user-dirs
5493   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
5494   xserver-xephyr
5495 </p></blockquote>
5496
5497 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
5498
5499 <blockquote><p>
5500   cheese
5501   ekiga
5502   eog
5503   epiphany-extensions
5504   evolution-exchange
5505   fast-user-switch-applet
5506   file-roller
5507   gcalctool
5508   gconf-editor
5509   gdm
5510   gedit
5511   gedit-common
5512   gnome-games
5513   gnome-games-data
5514   gnome-nettool
5515   gnome-system-tools
5516   gnome-themes
5517   gnuchess
5518   gucharmap
5519   guile-1.8-libs
5520   libavahi-ui0
5521   libdmx1
5522   libgalago3
5523   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
5524   libgtksourceview2.0-0
5525   liblircclient0
5526   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
5527   libspeexdsp1
5528   libsvga1
5529   rhythmbox
5530   seahorse
5531   sound-juicer
5532   system-config-printer
5533   totem-common
5534   transmission-gtk
5535   vinagre
5536   vino
5537 </p></blockquote>
5538
5539 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
5540
5541 <blockquote><p>
5542   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
5543 </p></blockquote>
5544
5545 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
5546
5547 <blockquote><p>
5548 [nothing]
5549 </p></blockquote>
5550
5551 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
5552
5553 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
5554
5555 <blockquote><p>
5556   ksmserver
5557 </p></blockquote>
5558
5559 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
5560
5561 <blockquote><p>
5562   kwin
5563   network-manager-kde
5564 </p></blockquote>
5565
5566 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
5567
5568 <blockquote><p>
5569   arts
5570   dolphin
5571   freespacenotifier
5572   google-gadgets-gst
5573   google-gadgets-xul
5574   kappfinder
5575   kcalc
5576   kcharselect
5577   kde-core
5578   kde-plasma-desktop
5579   kde-standard
5580   kde-window-manager
5581   kdeartwork
5582   kdeartwork-emoticons
5583   kdeartwork-style
5584   kdeartwork-theme-icon
5585   kdebase
5586   kdebase-apps
5587   kdebase-workspace
5588   kdebase-workspace-bin
5589   kdebase-workspace-data
5590   kdeeject
5591   kdelibs
5592   kdeplasma-addons
5593   kdeutils
5594   kdewallpapers
5595   kdf
5596   kfloppy
5597   kgpg
5598   khelpcenter4
5599   kinfocenter
5600   konq-plugins-l10n
5601   konqueror-nsplugins
5602   kscreensaver
5603   kscreensaver-xsavers
5604   ktimer
5605   kwrite
5606   libgle3
5607   libkde4-ruby1.8
5608   libkonq5
5609   libkonq5-templates
5610   libnetpbm10
5611   libplasma-ruby
5612   libplasma-ruby1.8
5613   libqt4-ruby1.8
5614   marble-data
5615   marble-plugins
5616   netpbm
5617   nuvola-icon-theme
5618   plasma-dataengines-workspace
5619   plasma-desktop
5620   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
5621   plasma-runners-addons
5622   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
5623   plasma-scriptengine-python
5624   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
5625   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
5626   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
5627   plasma-scriptengines
5628   plasma-wallpapers-addons
5629   plasma-widget-folderview
5630   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
5631   ruby
5632   sweeper
5633   update-notifier-kde
5634   xscreensaver-data-extra
5635   xscreensaver-gl
5636   xscreensaver-gl-extra
5637   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
5638 </p></blockquote>
5639
5640 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
5641
5642 <blockquote><p>
5643   ark
5644   google-gadgets-common
5645   google-gadgets-qt
5646   htdig
5647   kate
5648   kdebase-bin
5649   kdebase-data
5650   kdepasswd
5651   kfind
5652   klipper
5653   konq-plugins
5654   konqueror
5655   ksysguard
5656   ksysguardd
5657   libarchive1
5658   libcln6
5659   libeet1
5660   libeina-svn-06
5661   libggadget-1.0-0b
5662   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
5663   libgps19
5664   libkdecorations4
5665   libkephal4
5666   libkonq4
5667   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
5668   libkscreensaver5
5669   libksgrd4
5670   libksignalplotter4
5671   libkunitconversion4
5672   libkwineffects1a
5673   libmarblewidget4
5674   libntrack-qt4-1
5675   libntrack0
5676   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
5677   libplasmaclock4a
5678   libplasmagenericshell4
5679   libprocesscore4a
5680   libprocessui4a
5681   libqalculate5
5682   libqedje0a
5683   libqtruby4shared2
5684   libqzion0a
5685   libruby1.8
5686   libscim8c2a
5687   libsmokekdecore4-3
5688   libsmokekdeui4-3
5689   libsmokekfile3
5690   libsmokekhtml3
5691   libsmokekio3
5692   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
5693   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
5694   libsmokekparts3
5695   libsmokektexteditor3
5696   libsmokekutils3
5697   libsmokenepomuk3
5698   libsmokephonon3
5699   libsmokeplasma3
5700   libsmokeqtcore4-3
5701   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
5702   libsmokeqtgui4-3
5703   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
5704   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
5705   libsmokeqtscript4-3
5706   libsmokeqtsql4-3
5707   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
5708   libsmokeqttest4-3
5709   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
5710   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
5711   libsmokeqtxml4-3
5712   libsmokesolid3
5713   libsmokesoprano3
5714   libtaskmanager4a
5715   libtidy-0.99-0
5716   libweather-ion4a
5717   libxklavier16
5718   libxxf86misc1
5719   okteta
5720   oxygencursors
5721   plasma-dataengines-addons
5722   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
5723   plasma-widget-lancelot
5724   plasma-widgets-addons
5725   plasma-widgets-workspace
5726   polkit-kde-1
5727   ruby1.8
5728   systemsettings
5729   update-notifier-common
5730 </p></blockquote>
5731
5732 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
5733 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
5734 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
5735 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
5736
5737  </div>
5738  <div class="tags">
5739
5740
5741
5742   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5743
5744  </div>
5745 </div>
5746 <div class="padding"></div>
5747
5748 <div class="entry">
5749  <div class="title">
5750  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
5751  </div>
5752  <div class="date">
5753   2010-11-27 11:30
5754  </div>
5755
5756  <div class="body">
5757
5758 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
5759 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
5760 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
5761 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
5762 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
5763 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
5764 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
5765 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
5766
5767 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
5768 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
5769 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
5770 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
5771 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
5772 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
5773 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
5774 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
5775 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
5776 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
5777 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
5778
5779 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
5780 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
5781 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
5782 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
5783 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
5784 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
5785 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
5786 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
5787 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
5788 what is going on.</p>
5789
5790  </div>
5791  <div class="tags">
5792
5793
5794
5795   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5796
5797  </div>
5798 </div>
5799 <div class="padding"></div>
5800
5801 <div class="entry">
5802  <div class="title">
5803  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html">Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK</a>
5804  </div>
5805  <div class="date">
5806   2010-11-29 18:40
5807  </div>
5808
5809  <div class="body">
5810
5811 <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5812 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
5813 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
5814 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
5815 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
5816 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
5817
5818 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
5819 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
5820 will hold its
5821 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
5822 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
5823 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
5824 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
5825 vote this year.</p>
5826
5827  </div>
5828  <div class="tags">
5829
5830
5831
5832   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
5833
5834  </div>
5835 </div>
5836 <div class="padding"></div>
5837
5838 <div class="entry">
5839  <div class="title">
5840  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html">Student group continue the work on my Reprap 3D printer</a>
5841  </div>
5842  <div class="date">
5843   2010-12-09 19:30
5844  </div>
5845
5846  <div class="body">
5847
5848 <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
5849 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
5850 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
5851 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
5852 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
5853 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
5854 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
5855 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
5856 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
5857 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
5858 operational.</p>
5859
5860 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
5861 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
5862 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
5863 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
5864 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
5865 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
5866 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
5867
5868  </div>
5869  <div class="tags">
5870
5871
5872
5873   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap</a>.
5874
5875  </div>
5876 </div>
5877 <div class="padding"></div>
5878
5879 <div class="entry">
5880  <div class="title">
5881  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
5882  </div>
5883  <div class="date">
5884   2010-12-10 08:20
5885  </div>
5886
5887  <div class="body">
5888
5889 <p>With this weeks lawless
5890 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
5891 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
5892 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
5893 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
5894 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
5895 A blog post from
5896 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
5897 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
5898 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
5899 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
5900 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
5901 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
5902 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
5903
5904 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
5905 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
5906 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
5907 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
5908 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
5909 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
5910 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
5911 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
5912 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
5913 Debian</a> soon.</p>
5914
5915 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
5916 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
5917 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
5918 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
5919 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
5920 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
5921 you can even get
5922 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
5923 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
5924 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
5925 on the current exchange rates.</p>
5926
5927 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
5928 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
5929 donations to the address
5930 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
5931
5932  </div>
5933  <div class="tags">
5934
5935
5936
5937   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5938
5939  </div>
5940 </div>
5941 <div class="padding"></div>
5942
5943 <div class="entry">
5944  <div class="title">
5945  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
5946  </div>
5947  <div class="date">
5948   2010-12-11 15:10
5949  </div>
5950
5951  <div class="body">
5952
5953 <p>As I continue to explore
5954 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
5955 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
5956 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
5957
5958 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
5959 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
5960 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
5961 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
5962 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
5963 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
5964 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
5965 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
5966 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
5967 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
5968 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
5969 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
5970 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
5971 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
5972 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
5973 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
5974 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
5975 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
5976 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
5977 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
5978
5979 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
5980 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
5981 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
5982 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
5983 If the Skolelinux foundation
5984 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
5985 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
5986 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
5987 Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
5988 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
5989 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
5990 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
5991 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
5992
5993 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
5994 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
5995 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
5996 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
5997 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
5998 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
5999 so I wonder when my kind of show would start accepting BitCoins.  I
6000 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
6001 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
6002 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
6003 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
6004 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
6005 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
6006 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
6007 currencies.</p>
6008
6009 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
6010 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
6011 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
6012 to see which one get the next lump of cash.  The "winner" get 50
6013 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
6014 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
6015 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
6016 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
6017 BitCoins.  Check out
6018 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
6019 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
6020 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
6021 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
6022 yet.</p>
6023
6024  </div>
6025  <div class="tags">
6026
6027
6028
6029   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6030
6031  </div>
6032 </div>
6033 <div class="padding"></div>
6034
6035  <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="english.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14"></a></p>
6036
6037
6038
6039
6040 <div id="sidebar">
6041
6042 <h2>Archive</h2>
6043 <ul>
6044
6045 <li>2010
6046 <ul>
6047
6048 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
6049
6050 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
6051
6052 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
6053
6054 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
6055
6056 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
6057
6058 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
6059
6060 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
6061
6062 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
6063
6064 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
6065
6066 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
6067
6068 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
6069
6070 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (5)</a></li>
6071
6072 </ul></li>
6073
6074 <li>2009
6075 <ul>
6076
6077 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
6078
6079 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
6080
6081 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
6082
6083 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
6084
6085 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
6086
6087 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
6088
6089 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
6090
6091 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
6092
6093 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
6094
6095 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
6096
6097 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
6098
6099 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
6100
6101 </ul></li>
6102
6103 <li>2008
6104 <ul>
6105
6106 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
6107
6108 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
6109
6110 </ul></li>
6111
6112 </ul>
6113
6114
6115
6116 <h2>Tags</h2>
6117 <ul>
6118
6119  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
6120
6121  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
6122
6123  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
6124
6125  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (2)</a></li>
6126
6127  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (10)</a></li>
6128
6129  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (45)</a></li>
6130
6131  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (52)</a></li>
6132
6133  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (76)</a></li>
6134
6135  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (1)</a></li>
6136
6137  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (11)</a></li>
6138
6139  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (5)</a></li>
6140
6141  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
6142
6143  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (4)</a></li>
6144
6145  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
6146
6147  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (11)</a></li>
6148
6149  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (93)</a></li>
6150
6151  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (114)</a></li>
6152
6153  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (18)</a></li>
6154
6155  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (30)</a></li>
6156
6157  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
6158
6159  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (4)</a></li>
6160
6161  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
6162
6163  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (22)</a></li>
6164
6165  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (3)</a></li>
6166
6167  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (16)</a></li>
6168
6169  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (1)</a></li>
6170
6171  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (16)</a></li>
6172
6173  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (1)</a></li>
6174
6175  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (14)</a></li>
6176
6177 </ul>
6178
6179 </div>
6180 </body>
6181 </html>