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5 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Entries Tagged debian edu</title>
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11 <div class="title">
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 "debian edu".</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/Endelig_norsk_stavekontroll_med_st__tte_for_ord_med_bindestrek.html">Endelig norsk stavekontroll med støtte for ord med bindestrek</a>
103 </div>
104 <div class="date">
105 2008-12-26 11:00
106 </div>
107
108 <div class="body">
109
110 <p>Etter flere års mislykkede forsøk på å skrive om byggesystemet for
111 <a href="http://no.speling.org/">den norske stavekontrollen for bokmål
112 og nynorsk</a> til å ikke bruke bindestrek som ordskillemarkør, lyktes jeg
113 endelig første juledag. Bruken av bindestrek som ordskillemarkør har
114 gjort det umulig å få med ord med bindestrek i
115 stavekontrolldatagrunnlaget, slik at ord som e-post og CD-spiller ikke
116 kunne godtas av stavekontrollen. Hadde litt tid til overs å bruke på
117 stavekontrollen, og satte meg ned med to kopier av byggsystemet og en
118 liten testdatafil, og byttet ut - med = på utvalgte steder i
119 byggsystemet og datafilen helt til jeg fikk samme resultat med det
120 gamle og det nye byggsystemet. Dette tror jeg var forsøk 4, der de
121 foregående har feilet uten at jeg klarte å forstå hvorfor. Det sier
122 kanskje litt om kompleksiteten i det originale byggsystemet som Rune
123 Kleveland laget i sin tid.</p>
124
125 <p>Etter å ha endret byggsystemet, var neste steg å importere ordene
126 med bindestrek. Vi har en rekke slike i databasene for
127 <a href="http://tyge.sslug.dk/~korsvoll/nb.speling.org/htdocs/">bokmål</a>
128 og
129 <a href="http://tyge.sslug.dk/~korsvoll/nn.speling.org/htdocs/">nynorsk</a>
130 for korrektur av datagrunnlaget for stavekontrollen, og etter importen
131 skulle nå 10350 nye ord bli godkjent som korrekt stavede ord av
132 stavekontrollen.</p>
133
134 </div>
135 <div class="tags">
136
137
138
139 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
140
141 </div>
142 </div>
143 <div class="padding"></div>
144
145 <div class="entry">
146 <div class="title">
147 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
148 </div>
149 <div class="date">
150 2009-02-15 11:50
151 </div>
152
153 <div class="body">
154
155 <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
156 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
157 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
158 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
159 stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få
160 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
161 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
162 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
163 slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
164 gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
165 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
166 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
167
168 </div>
169 <div class="tags">
170
171
172
173 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/norsk">norsk</a>.
174
175 </div>
176 </div>
177 <div class="padding"></div>
178
179 <div class="entry">
180 <div class="title">
181 <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>
182 </div>
183 <div class="date">
184 2009-03-29 20:30
185 </div>
186
187 <div class="body">
188
189 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
190 optimal. There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
191 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
192 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
193 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
194 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
195
196 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
197 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
198 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
199 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
200 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
201 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
202 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
203 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
204 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
205 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
206 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
207 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
208 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
209
210 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
211 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
212 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
213 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
214
215 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
216 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
217
218 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
219 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
220 new IETF work group?</p>
221
222 </div>
223 <div class="tags">
224
225
226
227 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>.
228
229 </div>
230 </div>
231 <div class="padding"></div>
232
233 <div class="entry">
234 <div class="title">
235 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
236 </div>
237 <div class="date">
238 2009-03-29 21:00
239 </div>
240
241 <div class="body">
242
243 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
244 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
245 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
246 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
247 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
248 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
249 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
250 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
251 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
252 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
253 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
254 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
255 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
256 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
257 now. :)</p>
258
259 </div>
260 <div class="tags">
261
262
263
264 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>.
265
266 </div>
267 </div>
268 <div class="padding"></div>
269
270 <div class="entry">
271 <div class="title">
272 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p__stander_om_piratkopiering_m__ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
273 </div>
274 <div class="date">
275 2009-05-17 23:05
276 </div>
277
278 <div class="body">
279
280 <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
281 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
282 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
283 ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen
284 dager siden kom
285 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
286 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
287 dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
288 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
289 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
290
291 <blockquote>
292 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
293 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
294 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
295 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
296 </blockquote>
297
298 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er <a
299 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
300 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
301 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
302 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
303
304 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
305 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
306 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
307
308 </div>
309 <div class="tags">
310
311
312
313 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/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</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>.
314
315 </div>
316 </div>
317 <div class="padding"></div>
318
319 <div class="entry">
320 <div class="title">
321 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_operativt_webbasert_medlemsregister_for_Fri_programvare_i_skolen.html">Endelig operativt webbasert medlemsregister for Fri programvare i skolen</a>
322 </div>
323 <div class="date">
324 2009-11-02 22:40
325 </div>
326
327 <div class="body">
328
329 <p>Under helgens utviklersamling i
330 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.no/">Skolelinux</a> fikk jeg endelig
331 satt meg ned sammen med Ronny Aasen i styret for å få et webbasert
332 medlemsregister tilbake på plass for foreningen som passer på
333 skolelinuxprosjektet. Etter flere års knot og problemer, er nå
334 memberdb satt opp og klart til bruk. Import av det gamle
335 medlemsregisteret har vist seg vanskelig, så alle medlemmer bes om å
336 registrere seg på nytt. Hvis du støtter FRiSKs formål så er du
337 hjertelig velkommen til
338 <a href="http://medlem.friprogramvareiskolen.no/">å melde deg
339 inn</a>. Formålet lyder:</p>
340
341 <blockquote>Linux i skolen skal tilrettelegge for og informere om bruk
342 av fri programvare, i henhold til Debian Free Software Guidelines av
343 2002-02-03, i den norske skolen, slik som f.eks. Linux og
344 GNU.</blockquote>
345
346 </div>
347 <div class="tags">
348
349
350
351 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
352
353 </div>
354 </div>
355 <div class="padding"></div>
356
357 <div class="entry">
358 <div class="title">
359 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavet_til_Skolelinux_prosjektet.html">Opphavet til Skolelinux-prosjektet</a>
360 </div>
361 <div class="date">
362 2009-12-17 10:50
363 </div>
364
365 <div class="body">
366
367 <p>De færreste er klar over at Skolelinux-prosjektet kom som et resultat
368 av en avgjørelse på årsmøtet i
369 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> i 2000-06-29, der Håkon Wium
370 Lie, da varamedlem i styret, tok på seg oppdraget om å starte et
371 initiativ kalt "Teach the Teacher", som skulle være et initiativ for
372 å få fri programvare og unix-lignende operativsystemer inn i Skolen.
373 Tanken var at en måtte starte med lærerne for at ungene skulle få
374 mulighet til å møte en bedre IT-hverdag. Jeg var tilstede på
375 møtet, og hadde sans for ideen, men intet skjedde. På vårparten
376 2001 ble det arrangert en demonstrasjon i anledning at First Tuesday
377 hadde invitert Microsoft til et møte for å fortelle om fremtidens
378 Internet. Dette provoserte endel av oss, og EFN og NUUG tok initiativ
379 til å arrangere
380 <a href="http://www.digi.no/60982/first-tuesday-mote-med-microsoft-protest">en
381 demonstrasjon utenfor lokalene 2001-05-21</a>. Blant de som sto bak
382 demonstrasjonen var Vidar Bakke fra NUUG og Håkon W. Lie fra EFN.
383 Etter demonstrasjonen arrangerte Håkon en fest hjemme hos seg der alle
384 som hadde vært aktive i demonstrasjonsplanlegging og gjennomføringen
385 deltok. Før festen var jeg blitt lei av å vente på at Håkon skulle ta
386 initiativ til "Teach the Teacher", og for å forsøke å få litt fremgang
387 besteme jeg meg for å benytte anledningen hos Håkon til å snakke om
388 behovet for å hjelpe skolene i gang med bedre datasystemer bestående
389 av fri programvare og unix-lignende operativsystemer. Flere var
390 interessert, og Knut Yrvin tenkte på ideen. Han
391 <a href="http://developer.skolelinux.no/brev/2001-06-28-invitasjon-skolelinux.txt">ropte
392 sammen</a> til et stiftelsesmøte i prosjektet i sin arbeidsgivers
393 Objectwares lokaler ved Ullevål stadion 2001-07-02, og jeg ble med.
394 Resten er historie. :)</p>
395
396 </div>
397 <div class="tags">
398
399
400
401 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
402
403 </div>
404 </div>
405 <div class="padding"></div>
406
407 <div class="entry">
408 <div class="title">
409 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
410 </div>
411 <div class="date">
412 2010-01-27 15:15
413 </div>
414
415 <div class="body">
416
417 <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
418 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
419 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
420 Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
421 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
422 further.</p>
423
424 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
425 configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
426 configured to be a server for the
427 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
428 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
429 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
430 work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
431 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
432 computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
433 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
434 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
435 packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
436 and Nagios configuration.</p>
437
438 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
439 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
440 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
441 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
442
443 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
444 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
445 services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
446 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
447 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
448 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
449 the machine.</p>
450
451 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
452 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
453 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
454 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
455
456 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
457 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
458 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
459 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
460 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
461 everything is taken care of.</p>
462
463 </div>
464 <div class="tags">
465
466
467
468 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>.
469
470 </div>
471 </div>
472 <div class="padding"></div>
473
474 <div class="entry">
475 <div class="title">
476 <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>
477 </div>
478 <div class="date">
479 2010-02-11 17:15
480 </div>
481
482 <div class="body">
483
484 <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
485 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
486 shipped. This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
487 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up. Work on the first
488 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
489 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
490 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
491
492 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
493
494 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
495 next major release, based on Squeeze. We will try to get as many of
496 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
497 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
498
499 </div>
500 <div class="tags">
501
502
503
504 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>.
505
506 </div>
507 </div>
508 <div class="padding"></div>
509
510 <div class="entry">
511 <div class="title">
512 <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>
513 </div>
514 <div class="date">
515 2010-03-06 18:15
516 </div>
517
518 <div class="body">
519
520 <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
521 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
522 when the user log out. A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
523 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
524 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
525 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
526
527 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
528 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
529 been updated to use this framework. Next on my agenda is to make sure
530 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
531
532 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
533 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
534 after a user. With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
535 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
536 framework. My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
537 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
538
539 </div>
540 <div class="tags">
541
542
543
544 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>.
545
546 </div>
547 </div>
548 <div class="padding"></div>
549
550 <div class="entry">
551 <div class="title">
552 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
553 </div>
554 <div class="date">
555 2010-04-14 17:20
556 </div>
557
558 <div class="body">
559
560 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
561 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
562 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux. Setting up a
563 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
564 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
565 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
566 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
567 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
568 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
569
570 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration. Is there a
571 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
572 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups? With it, the
573 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
574 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
575
576 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
577 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together. Anyone know?</p>
578
579 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
580 Nagios. I have no idea how much work that will be to implement. We
581 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
582 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
583 to work properly.</p>
584
585 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
586 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
587 configuration and integration. A natural starting point would be
588 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
589 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
590 time.</p>
591
592 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
593 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
594 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home. The video show show
595 up in a few days.</p>
596
597 </div>
598 <div class="tags">
599
600
601
602 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>.
603
604 </div>
605 </div>
606 <div class="padding"></div>
607
608 <div class="entry">
609 <div class="title">
610 <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>
611 </div>
612 <div class="date">
613 2010-04-28 20:40
614 </div>
615
616 <div class="body">
617
618 <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
619 Debian Edu. The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
620 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
621 and go.</p>
622
623 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
624 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
625 example called Roaming Workstations. Here are my thought on this.
626 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
627
628 <ul>
629
630 <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
631 the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
632 the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
633 server. This allow the user to work also when offline. The
634 central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
635 request, for example mounted via CIFS. It could be mounted
636 automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
637 and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
638 hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
639 request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
640 can be used to access it when needed. Perhaps it is enough to use
641 the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
642
643 <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
644 authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
645 to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
646 to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server. This can be done using
647 <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
648 or the Fedora developed
649 <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
650 Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
651
652 <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
653 using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
654 directory, using unison.</li>
655
656 <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
657 their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
658 the box with CUPS. For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
659 system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
660 implemented.</li>
661
662 <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
663 sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
664
665 <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
666 cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
667 local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
668
669 </ul>
670
671 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
672 the moment. If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
673 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze. Some of the pieces need
674 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
675 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
676 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
677 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
678 when disconnected from the net. If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
679 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
680
681 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
682 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
683
684 </div>
685 <div class="tags">
686
687
688
689 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>.
690
691 </div>
692 </div>
693 <div class="padding"></div>
694
695 <div class="entry">
696 <div class="title">
697 <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>
698 </div>
699 <div class="date">
700 2010-05-02 13:47
701 </div>
702
703 <div class="body">
704
705 <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
706 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
707 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
708
709 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
710 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account
711 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
712 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
713 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
714
715 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
716 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
717
718 <blockquote><pre>
719 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
720 Last password change : May 02, 2010
721 Password expires : never
722 Password inactive : never
723 Account expires : never
724 Minimum number of days between password change : 0
725 Maximum number of days between password change : 99999
726 Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
727 root@tjener:~#
728 </pre></blockquote>
729
730 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
731 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
732 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
733 to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it
734 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
735 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
736
737 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
738 intended:</p>
739
740 <blockquote><pre>
741 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
742 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
743 Last password change : Jan 02, 1970
744 Password expires : never
745 Password inactive : never
746 Account expires : never
747 Minimum number of days between password change : 0
748 Maximum number of days between password change : 10950
749 Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
750 root@tjener:~#
751 </pre></blockquote>
752
753 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
754 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
755 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
756
757 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
758 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
759
760 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
761 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
762
763 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
764 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
765 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
766 on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
767 I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on
768 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there. I have not
769 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
770
771 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
772 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
773 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
774 change.</p>
775
776 </div>
777 <div class="tags">
778
779
780
781 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>.
782
783 </div>
784 </div>
785 <div class="padding"></div>
786
787 <div class="entry">
788 <div class="title">
789 <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>
790 </div>
791 <div class="date">
792 2010-05-14 21:10
793 </div>
794
795 <div class="body">
796
797 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
798 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
799 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
800 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
801 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
802 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
803 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
804 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
805
806 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
807 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
808 this on the collector host:</p>
809
810 <blockquote><pre>
811 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
812 </pre></blockquote>
813
814 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
815 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
816
817 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
818 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
819 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
820 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
821 written yet.</p>
822
823 </div>
824 <div class="tags">
825
826
827
828 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>.
829
830 </div>
831 </div>
832 <div class="padding"></div>
833
834 <div class="entry">
835 <div class="title">
836 <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>
837 </div>
838 <div class="date">
839 2010-05-14 22:40
840 </div>
841
842 <div class="body">
843
844 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
845 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
846 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
847 expected, if I am to believe the
848 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
849 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
850 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
851 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
852 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
853 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
854 version.</p>
855
856 More information about
857 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
858 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
859 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
860 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
861
862 <blockquote><pre>
863 CONCURRENCY=none
864 </pre></blockquote>
865
866 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
867 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
868 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
869 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
870
871 </div>
872 <div class="tags">
873
874
875
876 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>.
877
878 </div>
879 </div>
880 <div class="padding"></div>
881
882 <div class="entry">
883 <div class="title">
884 <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>
885 </div>
886 <div class="date">
887 2010-05-19 19:00
888 </div>
889
890 <div class="body">
891
892 <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
893 Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
894 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
895 package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
896 into unstable. The
897 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
898 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
899 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
900 passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
901 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
902 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
903 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
904
905 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
906 roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
907 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
908 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
909 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
910 #485282</a> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
911 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
912 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
913
914 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
915 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
916 problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
917 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
918 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
919 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
920 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
921
922 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
923 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
924 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
925 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
926 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
927 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
928 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
929 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
930 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
931 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
932 on the home directory servers.</p>
933
934 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
935 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
936 is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
937 message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
938 a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
939 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
940
941 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
942 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
943
944 </div>
945 <div class="tags">
946
947
948
949 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>.
950
951 </div>
952 </div>
953 <div class="padding"></div>
954
955 <div class="entry">
956 <div class="title">
957 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
958 </div>
959 <div class="date">
960 2010-05-22 21:30
961 </div>
962
963 <div class="body">
964
965 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
966 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
967 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
968 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
969
970 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
971 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
972 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
973 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
974 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
975 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
976 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
977 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
978 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
979 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
980 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
981 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
982 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
983 going to work.</p>
984
985 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
986 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
987 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
988 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
989 "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
990 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
991 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
992 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
993 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
994 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
995 Edu.</p>
996
997 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
998 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
999 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
1000 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
1001 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
1002 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
1003
1004 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
1005 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
1006
1007 </div>
1008 <div class="tags">
1009
1010
1011
1012 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>.
1013
1014 </div>
1015 </div>
1016 <div class="padding"></div>
1017
1018 <div class="entry">
1019 <div class="title">
1020 <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>
1021 </div>
1022 <div class="date">
1023 2010-05-27 23:55
1024 </div>
1025
1026 <div class="body">
1027
1028 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
1029 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
1030 issues are known and should be solved:
1031
1032 <p><ul>
1033
1034 <li>The wicd package seen to
1035 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
1036 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
1037 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
1038 seem to be on the case.</li>
1039
1040 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
1041 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
1042 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
1043 maintainer is on the case.</li>
1044
1045 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
1046 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
1047 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
1048 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
1049 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
1050 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
1051 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
1052 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
1053
1054 </ul></p>
1055
1056 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
1057 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
1058 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
1059 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
1060
1061 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
1062 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
1063 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1064 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
1065
1066 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
1067
1068 </div>
1069 <div class="tags">
1070
1071
1072
1073 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>.
1074
1075 </div>
1076 </div>
1077 <div class="padding"></div>
1078
1079 <div class="entry">
1080 <div class="title">
1081 <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>
1082 </div>
1083 <div class="date">
1084 2010-06-01 17:05
1085 </div>
1086
1087 <div class="body">
1088
1089 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
1090 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
1091 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
1092 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
1093 wait.</p>
1094
1095 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
1096 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
1097 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
1098 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
1099 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
1100 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
1101
1102 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
1103 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
1104 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
1105 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
1106 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
1107 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
1108 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
1109 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
1110
1111 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
1112
1113 </div>
1114 <div class="tags">
1115
1116
1117
1118 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>.
1119
1120 </div>
1121 </div>
1122 <div class="padding"></div>
1123
1124 <div class="entry">
1125 <div class="title">
1126 <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>
1127 </div>
1128 <div class="date">
1129 2010-06-03 12:05
1130 </div>
1131
1132 <div class="body">
1133
1134 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
1135 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
1136 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
1137 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
1138 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
1139
1140 <blockquote><pre>
1141 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
1142 vendor count
1143 Dell Computer Corporation 1
1144 PowerEdge 1750 1
1145 IBM 1
1146 eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]- 1
1147 Intel 2
1148 [no-dmi-info] 3
1149 maintainer:~#
1150 </pre></blockquote>
1151
1152 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
1153 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
1154 information listed with Intel as vendor and mo model, and virtual Xen
1155 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
1156 option to list the individual machines.</p>
1157
1158 <p>A larger list is
1159 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
1160 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
1161 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
1162 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
1163 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
1164 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
1165 collector.</p>
1166
1167 </div>
1168 <div class="tags">
1169
1170
1171
1172 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>.
1173
1174 </div>
1175 </div>
1176 <div class="padding"></div>
1177
1178 <div class="entry">
1179 <div class="title">
1180 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
1181 </div>
1182 <div class="date">
1183 2010-06-06 14:15
1184 </div>
1185
1186 <div class="body">
1187
1188 <p>Via the
1189 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
1190 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
1191 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
1192 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
1193 following the standards wars of today.</p>
1194
1195 </div>
1196 <div class="tags">
1197
1198
1199
1200 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>.
1201
1202 </div>
1203 </div>
1204 <div class="padding"></div>
1205
1206 <div class="entry">
1207 <div class="title">
1208 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_er_laget_for_sentraldrifting__naturligvis.html">Skolelinux er laget for sentraldrifting, naturligvis</a>
1209 </div>
1210 <div class="date">
1211 2010-06-09 12:30
1212 </div>
1213
1214 <div class="body">
1215
1216 <p>Det er merkelig hvordan myter om Skolelinux overlever. En slik
1217 myte er at Skolelinux ikke kan sentraldriftes og ha sentralt plasserte
1218 tjenermaskiner. I siste Computerworld Norge er
1219 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article169432.ece">IT-sjef
1220 Viggo Billdal i Steinkjer intervjuet</a>, og forteller uten
1221 blygsel:</p>
1222
1223 <blockquote><p>Vi hadde Skolelinux, men det har vi sluttet med. Vi testet
1224 om det lønte seg med Microsoft eller en åpen plattform. Vi fant ut at
1225 Microsoft egentlig var totalt sett bedre egnet. Det var store
1226 driftskostnader med Skolelinux, blant annet på grunn av
1227 desentraliserte servere. Det var komplisert, så vi gikk vekk fra det
1228 og bruker nå bare Windows.</p></blockquote>
1229
1230 <p>En <a
1231 href="https://init.linpro.no/pipermail/skolelinux.no/bruker/2010-June/009101.html">rask
1232 sjekk</a> mot den norske brukerlista i Skolelinuxprosjektet forteller
1233 at Steinkjers forsøk foregikk fram til 2004/2005, og at Røysing skole
1234 i Steinkjer skal ha vært svært fornøyd med Skolelinux men at kommunen
1235 overkjørte skolen og krevde at de gikk over til Windows. Et søk på
1236 nettet sendte meg til
1237 <a href="http://www.dn.no/multimedia/archive/00090/Dagens_it_nr__18_90826a.pdf">Dagens
1238 IT nr. 18 2005</a> hvor en kan lese på side 18:</p>
1239
1240 <blockquote><p>Inge Tømmerås ved Røysing skole i Steinkjer kjører ennå
1241 Microsoft, men forteller at kompetanseutfordringen med Skolelinux ikke
1242 var så stor. ­ Jeg syntes Skolelinux var utrolig lett å drifte uten
1243 forkunnskaper. Men man må jo selvsagt ha tilgang på ekstern kompetanse
1244 til installasjoner og maskinvarefeil, sier Tømmerås.</p></blockquote>
1245
1246 <p>Som systemarkitekten bak Skolelinux, kan jeg bare riste på hodet
1247 over påstanden om at Skolelinux krever desentraliserte tjenere.
1248 Skolelinux-arkitekturen er laget for sentralisert drift og plassering
1249 av tjenerne lokalt eller sentralt alt etter behov og nettkapasitet.
1250 Den er modellert på nettverks- og tjenerløsningen som brukes på
1251 Universitetet i Tromsø og Oslo, der jeg jobber med utvikling av
1252 driftstjenester. Dette er det heldigvis noen som har fått med seg, og
1253 jeg er glad for å kunne sitere fra en kommentar på den overnevnte
1254 artikkelen. Min venn og gamle kollega Sturle Sunde forteller der:
1255
1256 <blockquote>
1257 <p>I Flora kommune køyrer vi Skulelinux på skular med alt frå 15 til
1258 meir enn 500 elevar. Dei store skulane har eigen tenar, for det er
1259 mest praktisk. Eg, som er driftsansvarleg for heile nettet, ser
1260 sjeldan dei tenarane fysisk, men at dei står der gjer skulane mindre
1261 avhengige av eksterne linjer som er trege eller dyre. Dei minste
1262 skulane har ikkje eigen tenar. Å bruke sentral tenar er heller ikkje
1263 noko problem. Småskulane klarar seg fint med 1 mbit-linje til ein
1264 sentral tenar eller tenaren på ein større skule.</p>
1265
1266 <p>Det beste med Skulelinux er halvtjukke klientar. Dei treng ikkje
1267 harddisk og brukar minimalt med ressursar på tenaren fordi dei køyrer
1268 programma lokalt. Eit klasserom med 30 sju-åtte år gamle maskiner har
1269 mykje meir CPU og RAM totalt enn nokon moderne tenar til under
1270 millionen. Det trengst to kommandoar på den sentrale tenaren for å
1271 oppdatere alle klientane, både tynne og halvtjukke. Vi har ingen
1272 problem med diskar som ryk heller, som var eit problem før fordi
1273 elevane sat og sparka i maskinene. Og dei krev lite bandbreidde i
1274 nettet, so det er fullt mogleg å køyre slike på småskular med trege
1275 linjer mot tenaren på ein større skule.</p>
1276
1277 <p>Flora kommune har nesten 800 Linux-maskiner i sitt skulenett, og
1278 ein person som tek seg av drift av heile nettet, inkludert tenarar,
1279 klientar, operativsystem, programvare, heimekontorløysing og
1280 administrasjon av brukarar.</p>
1281
1282 <p>No skal det seiast at vi ikkje køyrer rein Skulelinux ut av
1283 boksen. Vi har gjort ein del tilpassingar mot noko Novell-greier som
1284 var der frå før, og som har komplisert installasjonen vår. Etter at
1285 oppsettet var gjort har løysinga vore stabil og kravd minimalt med
1286 arbeid.</p>
1287 </blockquote>
1288
1289 <p>Jeg vet at Narvik, Harstad og Oslo er kommuner der Skolelinux
1290 sentraldriftes med sentrale tjenere. Det forteller meg at Steinkjers
1291 IT-sjef neppe bør skylde på Skolelinux-løsningen for sine 5 år gamle
1292 minner.</p>
1293
1294 </div>
1295 <div class="tags">
1296
1297
1298
1299 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1300
1301 </div>
1302 </div>
1303 <div class="padding"></div>
1304
1305 <div class="entry">
1306 <div class="title">
1307 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
1308 </div>
1309 <div class="date">
1310 2010-06-11 22:50
1311 </div>
1312
1313 <div class="body">
1314
1315 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
1316 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
1317 have been discovered and reported in the process
1318 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
1319 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
1320 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
1321 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
1322 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
1323
1324 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
1325 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
1326 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
1327 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
1328 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
1329 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
1330
1331 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
1332 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
1333 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
1334 is created. The bug report
1335 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
1336 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
1337 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
1338 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
1339 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
1340 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
1341 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
1342 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
1343 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
1344 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
1345 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
1346 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
1347 Debian Squeeze.</p>
1348
1349 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
1350 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
1351 trick:</p>
1352
1353 <blockquote><pre>
1354 #!/bin/sh
1355 set -ex
1356
1357 if [ "$1" ] ; then
1358 desktop=$1
1359 else
1360 desktop=gnome
1361 fi
1362
1363 from=lenny
1364 to=squeeze
1365
1366 exec &lt; /dev/null
1367 unset LANG
1368 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
1369 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
1370 fuser -mv .
1371 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
1372 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
1373 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
1374 #!/bin/sh
1375 exit 101
1376 EOF
1377 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
1378 exit_cleanup() {
1379 umount $tmpdir/proc
1380 }
1381 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
1382 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
1383 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
1384
1385 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
1386
1387 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
1388 # to return the correct answers.
1389 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
1390 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
1391
1392 # Include the desktop and laptop task
1393 for test in desktop laptop ; do
1394 echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
1395 #!/bin/sh
1396 exit 2
1397 EOF
1398 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
1399 done
1400
1401 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
1402 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
1403 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
1404 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
1405
1406 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
1407 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
1408 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
1409 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
1410 fuser -mv
1411 </pre></blockquote>
1412
1413 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
1414 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
1415 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
1416 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
1417 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
1418 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
1419
1420 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
1421 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
1422 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
1423 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
1424 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
1425 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
1426 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
1427
1428 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
1429 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
1430 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
1431 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
1432 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
1433 packages.</p>
1434
1435 </div>
1436 <div class="tags">
1437
1438
1439
1440 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>.
1441
1442 </div>
1443 </div>
1444 <div class="padding"></div>
1445
1446 <div class="entry">
1447 <div class="title">
1448 <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>
1449 </div>
1450 <div class="date">
1451 2010-06-13 09:05
1452 </div>
1453
1454 <div class="body">
1455
1456 <p>My
1457 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
1458 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
1459 finally made the upgrade logs available from
1460 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
1461 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
1462 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
1463 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
1464
1465 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
1466 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
1467 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
1468 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
1469 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
1470 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
1471 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
1472 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
1473
1474 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
1475 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
1476 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
1477 too surprising.</p>
1478
1479 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
1480 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
1481 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
1482 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
1483 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
1484 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
1485 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
1486 continue.</p>
1487
1488 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
1489 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
1490 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
1491 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
1492 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
1493 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
1494 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
1495 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
1496 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
1497 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
1498 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
1499 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
1500 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
1501 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
1502 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
1503 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
1504 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
1505 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
1506 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
1507 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
1508 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
1509 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
1510 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
1511 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
1512 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
1513 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
1514 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
1515 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
1516 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
1517 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
1518
1519 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
1520
1521 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
1522 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
1523 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
1524 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
1525 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
1526 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
1527 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
1528 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
1529 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
1530 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
1531 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
1532 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
1533 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
1534 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
1535 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
1536 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
1537 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
1538 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
1539 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
1540 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
1541 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
1542 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
1543 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
1544 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
1545 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
1546 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
1547 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
1548 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
1549 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
1550 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
1551 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
1552 zip</p>
1553
1554 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
1555
1556 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
1557 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
1558 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
1559 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
1560 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
1561 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
1562 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
1563 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
1564 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
1565 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
1566 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
1567 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
1568 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
1569 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
1570 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
1571 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
1572 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
1573 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
1574 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
1575 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
1576 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
1577 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
1578 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
1579 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
1580 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
1581 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
1582 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
1583 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
1584
1585 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
1586 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
1587 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
1588 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
1589 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
1590 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
1591 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
1592 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
1593 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
1594 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
1595 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
1596 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
1597 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
1598 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
1599 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
1600 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
1601 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
1602 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
1603 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
1604 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
1605 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
1606 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
1607 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
1608 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
1609 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
1610 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
1611 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
1612 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
1613 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
1614 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
1615 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
1616 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
1617 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
1618 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
1619 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
1620 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
1621 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
1622 xulrunner-1.9</p>
1623
1624
1625 </div>
1626 <div class="tags">
1627
1628
1629
1630 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>.
1631
1632 </div>
1633 </div>
1634 <div class="padding"></div>
1635
1636 <div class="entry">
1637 <div class="title">
1638 <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>
1639 </div>
1640 <div class="date">
1641 2010-06-24 00:35
1642 </div>
1643
1644 <div class="body">
1645
1646 <p>A while back, I
1647 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
1648 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
1649 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
1650 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
1651
1652 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
1653 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
1654 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
1655 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
1656
1657 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
1658 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
1659 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
1660 Debian Edu.</p>
1661
1662 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
1663 the
1664 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
1665 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
1666 available today from IETF.</p>
1667
1668 <pre>
1669 --- dhcp.schema (revision 65192)
1670 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
1671 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
1672 objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
1673 NAME 'dhcpHost'
1674 DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
1675 - SUP top
1676 + SUP top AUXILIARY
1677 MUST cn
1678 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
1679 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
1680 </pre>
1681
1682 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
1683 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
1684 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
1685
1686 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
1687 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
1688
1689 </div>
1690 <div class="tags">
1691
1692
1693
1694 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>.
1695
1696 </div>
1697 </div>
1698 <div class="padding"></div>
1699
1700 <div class="entry">
1701 <div class="title">
1702 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
1703 </div>
1704 <div class="date">
1705 2010-06-28 00:30
1706 </div>
1707
1708 <div class="body">
1709
1710 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
1711 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
1712 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
1713 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
1714 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
1715 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
1716 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
1717 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
1718 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
1719 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
1720
1721 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
1722 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
1723 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
1724 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
1725 released.</p>
1726
1727 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
1728 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
1729 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
1730 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
1731
1732 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
1733 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
1734
1735 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
1736 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
1737 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
1738 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
1739 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
1740
1741 </div>
1742 <div class="tags">
1743
1744
1745
1746 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>.
1747
1748 </div>
1749 </div>
1750 <div class="padding"></div>
1751
1752 <div class="entry">
1753 <div class="title">
1754 <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>
1755 </div>
1756 <div class="date">
1757 2010-07-01 11:40
1758 </div>
1759
1760 <div class="body">
1761
1762 <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
1763 a bit troubling. Laptops are typically used also when not connected
1764 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
1765 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
1766 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
1767 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
1768 in Debian. Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
1769 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
1770 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
1771
1772 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
1773
1774 This is the traditional method with a twist. The password caching is
1775 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
1776 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd. The directory
1777 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP. If one want to use
1778 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
1779 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal. If one is happy having a
1780 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
1781 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
1782 using libpam-mklocaluser. A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
1783 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
1784 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
1785 archive. Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
1786 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
1787 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/. This
1788 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
1789
1790 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
1791
1792 <blockquote><pre>
1793 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
1794 </pre></blockquote>
1795
1796 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
1797 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site. Make sure the
1798 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
1799 sent in clear text to the LDAP server. I've been unable to get TLS
1800 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
1801 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
1802 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
1803 on how to get this working.</p>
1804
1805 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
1806 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
1807 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
1808 currently in /etc/nscd.conf. The changes are in the fields
1809 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
1810 instructions I found in the
1811 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
1812 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
1813
1814 <blockquote><pre>
1815 debug-level 0
1816 reload-count unlimited
1817 paranoia no
1818
1819 enable-cache passwd yes
1820 positive-time-to-live passwd 2592000
1821 negative-time-to-live passwd 20
1822 suggested-size passwd 211
1823 check-files passwd yes
1824 persistent passwd yes
1825 shared passwd yes
1826 max-db-size passwd 33554432
1827 auto-propagate passwd yes
1828
1829 enable-cache group yes
1830 positive-time-to-live group 2592000
1831 negative-time-to-live group 20
1832 suggested-size group 211
1833 check-files group yes
1834 persistent group yes
1835 shared group yes
1836 max-db-size group 33554432
1837 auto-propagate group yes
1838
1839 enable-cache hosts no
1840 positive-time-to-live hosts 2592000
1841 negative-time-to-live hosts 20
1842 suggested-size hosts 211
1843 check-files hosts yes
1844 persistent hosts yes
1845 shared hosts yes
1846 max-db-size hosts 33554432
1847
1848 enable-cache services yes
1849 positive-time-to-live services 2592000
1850 negative-time-to-live services 20
1851 suggested-size services 211
1852 check-files services yes
1853 persistent services yes
1854 shared services yes
1855 max-db-size services 33554432
1856 </pre></blockquote>
1857
1858 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
1859 automatically like the one provided in
1860 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
1861 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
1862 directory service on the machine. /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
1863 look like this:</p>
1864
1865 <blockquote><pre>
1866 passwd: files ldap
1867 group: files ldap
1868 shadow: files ldap
1869 hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
1870 networks: files
1871 protocols: files
1872 services: files
1873 ethers: files
1874 rpc: files
1875 netgroup: files ldap
1876 </pre></blockquote>
1877
1878 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
1879 shadow and netgroup.</p>
1880
1881 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
1882 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
1883 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
1884 attributes cached.
1885
1886 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
1887 libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
1888
1889 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
1890 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
1891 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
1892 LDAP database is available. I have not tested such setup, because I
1893 discovered sssd.</p>
1894
1895 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
1896
1897 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
1898 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
1899 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
1900 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
1901 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
1902 machines. The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
1903 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
1904 libpam-ccreds. It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS. Version
1905 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
1906 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010. Because the
1907 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
1908 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
1909 version 1.2 is now in testing.
1910
1911 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
1912 roaming setup I want</p>
1913
1914 <blockquote><pre>
1915 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
1916 </pre></blockquote>
1917
1918 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
1919 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
1920
1921 <blockquote><pre>
1922 [sssd]
1923 config_file_version = 2
1924 reconnection_retries = 3
1925 sbus_timeout = 30
1926 services = nss, pam
1927 domains = INTERN
1928
1929 [nss]
1930 filter_groups = root
1931 filter_users = root
1932 reconnection_retries = 3
1933
1934 [pam]
1935 reconnection_retries = 3
1936
1937 [domain/INTERN]
1938 enumerate = false
1939 cache_credentials = true
1940
1941 id_provider = ldap
1942 auth_provider = ldap
1943 chpass_provider = ldap
1944
1945 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
1946 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
1947 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
1948 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
1949 </pre></blockquote>
1950
1951 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking. Had to set
1952 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
1953
1954 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
1955 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
1956 modify it manually.</p>
1957
1958 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
1959 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
1960
1961 </div>
1962 <div class="tags">
1963
1964
1965
1966 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>.
1967
1968 </div>
1969 </div>
1970 <div class="padding"></div>
1971
1972 <div class="entry">
1973 <div class="title">
1974 <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>
1975 </div>
1976 <div class="date">
1977 2010-07-03 23:55
1978 </div>
1979
1980 <div class="body">
1981
1982 <p>Here is a short update on my <a
1983 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
1984 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>. Here is a summary of the
1985 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
1986 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
1987 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
1988 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
1989 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
1990
1991 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
1992 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
1993 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
1994 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
1995 publish the difference.</p>
1996
1997 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1998
1999 <blockquote><p>
2000 at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2001 libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
2002 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
2003 libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2004 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
2005 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
2006 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
2007 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
2008 </p></blockquote>
2009
2010 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
2011
2012 <blockquote><p>
2013 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
2014 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
2015 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
2016 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
2017 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
2018 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
2019 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2020 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
2021 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
2022 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
2023 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
2024 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
2025 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
2026 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
2027 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
2028 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
2029 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
2030 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
2031 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
2032 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
2033 </p></blockquote>
2034
2035 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
2036
2037 <blockquote><p>
2038 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
2039 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
2040 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2041 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
2042 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
2043 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
2044 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
2045 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
2046 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
2047 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
2048 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
2049 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
2050 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
2051 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
2052 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
2053 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
2054 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
2055 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
2056 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
2057 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
2058 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
2059 </p></blockquote>
2060
2061 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
2062
2063 <blockquote><p>
2064 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
2065 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
2066 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
2067 </p></blockquote>
2068
2069 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
2070 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
2071 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
2072 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
2073 the difference somewhat.
2074
2075 </div>
2076 <div class="tags">
2077
2078
2079
2080 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>.
2081
2082 </div>
2083 </div>
2084 <div class="padding"></div>
2085
2086 <div class="entry">
2087 <div class="title">
2088 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
2089 </div>
2090 <div class="date">
2091 2010-07-09 12:55
2092 </div>
2093
2094 <div class="body">
2095
2096 <p>Since
2097 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
2098 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
2099 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
2100 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
2101 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
2102 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
2103 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
2104 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
2105 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
2106 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
2107 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
2108 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
2109 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
2110
2111 </div>
2112 <div class="tags">
2113
2114
2115
2116 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>.
2117
2118 </div>
2119 </div>
2120 <div class="padding"></div>
2121
2122 <div class="entry">
2123 <div class="title">
2124 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
2125 </div>
2126 <div class="date">
2127 2010-07-11 22:00
2128 </div>
2129
2130 <div class="body">
2131
2132 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
2133 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
2134 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
2135 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
2136
2137 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
2138 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
2139 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
2140 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
2141 LTSP clients.</p>
2142
2143 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
2144 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
2145 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
2146
2147 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
2148 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
2149 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
2150
2151 <blockquote><pre>
2152 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
2153 #
2154 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
2155 #
2156 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
2157 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
2158 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
2159 #
2160 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
2161 # existence of attribute names.
2162 #
2163 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
2164 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
2165 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
2166 #
2167 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
2168 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
2169 #
2170 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
2171 # SUP top
2172 # AUXILIARY
2173 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
2174
2175 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
2176 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
2177 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
2178 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
2179 filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
2180 ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
2181 grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
2182 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
2183 attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
2184 # bass value on to clients
2185 eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
2186 done
2187 done
2188 fi
2189 </pre></blockquote>
2190
2191 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
2192 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
2193 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
2194 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
2195 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
2196
2197 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2198 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2199
2200 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
2201 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
2202 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
2203 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>. I found its
2204 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
2205 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
2206
2207 </div>
2208 <div class="tags">
2209
2210
2211
2212 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>.
2213
2214 </div>
2215 </div>
2216 <div class="padding"></div>
2217
2218 <div class="entry">
2219 <div class="title">
2220 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
2221 </div>
2222 <div class="date">
2223 2010-07-14 23:45
2224 </div>
2225
2226 <div class="body">
2227
2228 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
2229 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
2230 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
2231 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
2232 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
2233
2234 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
2235 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
2236
2237 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
2238 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
2239 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
2240 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
2241 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
2242 to a slave DNS server.</p>
2243
2244 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
2245 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
2246 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
2247 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
2248 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
2249 seem to work.</p>
2250
2251 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
2252 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
2253 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
2254 this:</p>
2255
2256 <blockquote><pre>
2257 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2258 cn: hostname
2259 objectClass: dhcphost
2260 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2261 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
2262 associateddomain: hostname.intern
2263 arecord: 10.11.12.13
2264 dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2265 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
2266 ldapconfigsound: Y
2267 </pre></blockquote>
2268
2269 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
2270 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
2271 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
2272 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
2273
2274 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
2275 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
2276 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
2277 that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
2278 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
2279 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
2280 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
2281 might be a good place to put it.</p>
2282
2283 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2284 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2285
2286 </div>
2287 <div class="tags">
2288
2289
2290
2291 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>.
2292
2293 </div>
2294 </div>
2295 <div class="padding"></div>
2296
2297 <div class="entry">
2298 <div class="title">
2299 <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>
2300 </div>
2301 <div class="date">
2302 2010-07-17 21:00
2303 </div>
2304
2305 <div class="body">
2306
2307 <p>This is a
2308 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
2309 on my
2310 <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
2311 work</a> on
2312 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
2313 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
2314
2315 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
2316 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
2317 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
2318 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
2319
2320 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
2321 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
2322 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
2323
2324 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
2325
2326 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
2327 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
2328 the web.
2329
2330 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
2331 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
2332 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
2333 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
2334 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
2335 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
2336
2337 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
2338 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
2339 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
2340 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
2341 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
2342 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
2343 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
2344 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
2345 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
2346 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
2347 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
2348 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
2349 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
2350 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
2351 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
2352 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
2353
2354 <blockquote><pre>
2355 ldapsearch -h ldap \
2356 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
2357 -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
2358 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
2359 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
2360 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
2361 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
2362
2363 ldapsearch -h ldap \
2364 -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
2365 -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
2366 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
2367 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
2368 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
2369 </pre></blockquote>
2370
2371 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
2372 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
2373 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
2374 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2375 also exist.</p>
2376
2377 <blockquote><pre>
2378 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2379 objectclass: top
2380 objectclass: dnsdomain
2381 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2382 dc: tjener
2383 arecord: 10.0.2.2
2384 associateddomain: tjener.intern
2385
2386 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2387 objectclass: top
2388 objectclass: dnsdomain2
2389 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2390 dc: 2
2391 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
2392 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
2393 </pre></blockquote>
2394
2395 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
2396 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
2397 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
2398 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
2399 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
2400 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
2401 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
2402 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
2403 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
2404 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
2405 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
2406 instead.</p>
2407
2408 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
2409 like this:</p>
2410
2411 <blockquote><pre>
2412 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
2413 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
2414 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
2415 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
2416 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
2417 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
2418
2419 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
2420 '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
2421 </pre></blockquote>
2422
2423 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
2424 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
2425 reverse lookups.</p>
2426
2427 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
2428 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
2429 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
2430 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
2431
2432 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
2433 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
2434 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
2435
2436 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
2437 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
2438 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
2439 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
2440 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
2441
2442 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
2443 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
2444 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
2445 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
2446 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
2447
2448 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
2449 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
2450 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
2451 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
2452 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
2453 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
2454
2455 <blockquote><pre>
2456 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
2457 SUP top
2458 AUXILIARY
2459 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
2460 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
2461 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
2462 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
2463 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
2464 ))
2465 </pre></blockquote>
2466
2467 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
2468 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
2469 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
2470 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
2471 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
2472 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
2473
2474 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
2475
2476 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
2477 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
2478 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
2479 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
2480 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
2481
2482 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
2483 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
2484 stored. These are the relevant entries from
2485 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
2486
2487 <blockquote><pre>
2488 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
2489 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
2490 </pre></blockquote>
2491
2492 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
2493 configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
2494 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
2495 search result is this entry:</p>
2496
2497 <blockquote><pre>
2498 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2499 cn: dhcp
2500 objectClass: top
2501 objectClass: dhcpServer
2502 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2503 </pre></blockquote>
2504
2505 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
2506 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
2507 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
2508 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
2509 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
2510 The search result is this entry:</p>
2511
2512 <blockquote><pre>
2513 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2514 cn: DHCP Config
2515 objectClass: top
2516 objectClass: dhcpService
2517 objectClass: dhcpOptions
2518 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2519 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
2520 dhcpStatements: authoritative
2521 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
2522 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
2523 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
2524 </pre></blockquote>
2525
2526 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
2527 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
2528 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
2529 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
2530 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
2531 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
2532 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
2533 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
2534 related computer objects.</p>
2535
2536 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
2537 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
2538 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
2539 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
2540 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
2541 like:</p>
2542
2543 <blockquote><pre>
2544 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2545 cn: hostname
2546 objectClass: top
2547 objectClass: dhcpHost
2548 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2549 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
2550 </pre></blockquote>
2551
2552 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
2553 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
2554 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
2555 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
2556 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
2557 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
2558 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
2559 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
2560 structural object class.
2561
2562 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
2563
2564 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
2565 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
2566 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
2567 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
2568 in the configuration.</p>
2569
2570 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
2571 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
2572 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
2573 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
2574 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
2575 structure.</p>
2576
2577 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
2578 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
2579
2580 <blockquote><pre>
2581 ou=services
2582 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
2583 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
2584 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
2585 cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
2586 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
2587 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
2588 cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
2589 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
2590 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
2591 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
2592 </pre></blockquote>
2593
2594 <P>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
2595 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
2596 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
2597 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
2598
2599 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
2600 like this:</p>
2601
2602 <blockquote><pre>
2603 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2604 dc: hostname
2605 objectClass: top
2606 objectClass: dhcpHost
2607 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2608 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
2609 associateddomain: hostname.intern
2610 arecord: 10.11.12.13
2611 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2612 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
2613 </pre></blockquote>
2614
2615 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
2616 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
2617 auxiliary object class.</p>
2618
2619 </div>
2620 <div class="tags">
2621
2622
2623
2624 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>.
2625
2626 </div>
2627 </div>
2628 <div class="padding"></div>
2629
2630 <div class="entry">
2631 <div class="title">
2632 <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>
2633 </div>
2634 <div class="date">
2635 2010-07-25 10:00
2636 </div>
2637
2638 <div class="body">
2639
2640 <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
2641 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
2642 Edu/Skolelinux into shape. This future version will use Kerberos for
2643 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
2644 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
2645
2646 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
2647 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
2648 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
2649 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server. This
2650 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
2651 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
2652 package. I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
2653
2654 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
2655 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
2656 password when mounting the SMB volume. A simple click on the shortcut
2657 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
2658 up. :)</p>
2659
2660 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
2661 Debian Edu. We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
2662 also Samba. Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
2663
2664 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
2665 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
2666 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
2667 the release. It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
2668 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
2669 time for a alpha0 release today. As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
2670 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
2671 release another day.</p>
2672
2673 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
2674 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2675
2676 </div>
2677 <div class="tags">
2678
2679
2680
2681 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>.
2682
2683 </div>
2684 </div>
2685 <div class="padding"></div>
2686
2687 <div class="entry">
2688 <div class="title">
2689 <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>
2690 </div>
2691 <div class="date">
2692 2010-07-27 17:45
2693 </div>
2694
2695 <div class="body">
2696
2697 <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
2698 with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step
2699 completed.</p>
2700
2701 <blockquote>
2702 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
2703 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
2704 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
2705 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
2706 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
2707 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
2708 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
2709 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
2710
2711 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
2712 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
2713 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
2714
2715 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
2716 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
2717 much.</p>
2718
2719 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
2720
2721 <ul>
2722 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
2723 <ul>
2724 <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
2725 combination with some new artwork
2726 <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
2727 <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
2728 <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
2729 <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
2730 <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
2731 <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
2732 <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
2733 <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
2734 <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
2735 </ul></li>
2736 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
2737 Enabled for:
2738 <ul>
2739 <li>PAM
2740 <li>LDAP
2741 <li>IMAP
2742 <li>SMTP (sender verification)
2743 </ul>
2744 </li>
2745 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
2746 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
2747 fetched from LDAP.</li>
2748 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
2749 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
2750 </ul>
2751 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
2752
2753 <ul>
2754 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
2755 scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
2756 for testing.</li>
2757 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
2758 and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
2759 clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
2760 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
2761 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
2762 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
2763 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
2764 netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
2765 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
2766 some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
2767 jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
2768 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
2769 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
2770 and help out with translations.</li>
2771 </ul>
2772
2773 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
2774
2775 <ul>
2776 <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>
2777 <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>
2778 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
2779 </ul>
2780 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
2781
2782 <ul>
2783 <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>
2784 <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>
2785 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
2786 </ul>
2787
2788 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
2789 get closer to the final release.</p>
2790
2791 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
2792
2793 <ul>
2794 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
2795 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
2796 </ul>
2797
2798 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
2799 <ul>
2800 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
2801 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
2802 </ul>
2803 <p>How to report bugs:
2804 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
2805
2806 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
2807 </blockquote>
2808
2809 </div>
2810 <div class="tags">
2811
2812
2813
2814 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>.
2815
2816 </div>
2817 </div>
2818 <div class="padding"></div>
2819
2820 <div class="entry">
2821 <div class="title">
2822 <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>
2823 </div>
2824 <div class="date">
2825 2010-08-03 23:30
2826 </div>
2827
2828 <div class="body">
2829
2830 <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
2831 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
2832 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
2833 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
2834 infrastructure. In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
2835 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
2836 servers.</p>
2837
2838 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
2839 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
2840 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
2841 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
2842 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
2843 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
2844 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
2845 .uio.no.</p>
2846
2847 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
2848 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
2849 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
2850 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
2851 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
2852 university servers.</p>
2853
2854 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
2855 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
2856 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
2857 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
2858 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
2859 uses.</p>
2860
2861 </div>
2862 <div class="tags">
2863
2864
2865
2866 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>.
2867
2868 </div>
2869 </div>
2870 <div class="padding"></div>
2871
2872 <div class="entry">
2873 <div class="title">
2874 <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>
2875 </div>
2876 <div class="date">
2877 2010-08-07 14:45
2878 </div>
2879
2880 <div class="body">
2881
2882 <p>A few days ago, I
2883 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
2884 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
2885 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
2886 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
2887 university infrastructure. It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
2888 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
2889 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
2890 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
2891 around it. Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
2892
2893 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
2894 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
2895 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
2896 servers for Kerberos authentication. All this without any
2897 configuration at all during installation. My users home directory got
2898 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
2899 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured. In addition to
2900 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
2901 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
2902 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. Iceweasel and KDE is
2903 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
2904 a proxy when at the university network. If the machine is moved to a
2905 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
2906 gave it a IP address.</p>
2907
2908 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
2909 entry ldap.$domain. If this do not exist, it look for the
2910 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
2911 server. Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
2912 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
2913 pick the first one as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
2914 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
2915 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
2916
2917 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask. SMB mounting my home
2918 directory do not work. No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
2919 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
2920 the cause. These are not properly configured during installation, and
2921 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
2922 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
2923
2924 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
2925 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
2926 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
2927 authentication. It should also work out of the box in a Active
2928 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
2929 with UID and GID values.</p>
2930
2931 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
2932 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2933
2934 </div>
2935 <div class="tags">
2936
2937
2938
2939 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>.
2940
2941 </div>
2942 </div>
2943 <div class="padding"></div>
2944
2945 <div class="entry">
2946 <div class="title">
2947 <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>
2948 </div>
2949 <div class="date">
2950 2010-08-08 21:20
2951 </div>
2952
2953 <div class="body">
2954
2955 <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
2956 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
2957 Edu/Skolelinux machines. This was thought to be no problem, as the
2958 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
2959 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
2960 mount home directories without any problems. But, after months of
2961 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
2962
2963 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
2964 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
2965 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
2966 underlying file system is a unix file system. When using a Windows
2967 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
2968 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
2969 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
2970
2971 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
2972 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
2973 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
2974 it should. If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
2975 help you find your way out again. This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
2976
2977 <pre>
2978 /*
2979 * Some tests to check the file system sematics. Used to verify that
2980 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
2981 * directory.
2982 * License: GPL v2 or later
2983 *
2984 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
2985 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
2986 */
2987
2988 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
2989 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
2990 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
2991
2992 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
2993
2994 #include &lt;errno.h>
2995 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
2996 #include &lt;stdio.h>
2997 #include &lt;string.h>
2998 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
2999 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
3000 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
3001 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
3002 #include &lt;unistd.h>
3003
3004 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
3005 /*
3006 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
3007 * package and linking with -lsqlite3. A more low level test is
3008 * below.
3009 * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
3010 */
3011 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
3012 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS \
3013 "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
3014 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
3015 char *zErrMsg;
3016 char *name = "testsqlite.db";
3017 sqlite3 *db=NULL;
3018 unlink(name);
3019 int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
3020 if( rc ){
3021 printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
3022 sqlite3_close(db);
3023 return -1;
3024 }
3025
3026 /* create tables */
3027 rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL, 0, &zErrMsg);
3028 if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
3029 printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
3030 sqlite3_close(db);
3031 return -1;
3032 }
3033 printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
3034 sqlite3_close(db);
3035 return 0;
3036 }
3037 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
3038
3039 /*
3040 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3. This
3041 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003. This is
3042 * done in the sqlite3 library.
3043 * See also
3044 * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
3045 * POSIX specification
3046 * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
3047 */
3048 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
3049 struct flock fl;
3050 char *name = "testsqlite.db";
3051 unlink(name);
3052 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
3053 printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
3054
3055 fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
3056 fl.l_pid = getpid();
3057 printf(" Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
3058 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
3059 fl.l_len = 1;
3060 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
3061 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3062
3063 printf(" Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
3064 fl.l_start = 1073741826;
3065 fl.l_len = 510;
3066 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
3067 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3068
3069 printf(" Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
3070 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
3071 fl.l_len = 1;
3072 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
3073 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3074
3075 printf(" Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
3076 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
3077 fl.l_len = 1;
3078 fl.l_type = F_WRLCK;
3079 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3080
3081 printf(" Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
3082 fl.l_start = 1073741826;
3083 fl.l_len = 510;
3084 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3085
3086 printf(" Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
3087 fl.l_start = 1073741824;
3088 fl.l_len = 2;
3089 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
3090 if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
3091
3092 close(fd);
3093 return 0;
3094 }
3095
3096 /*
3097 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
3098 * below them. This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
3099 * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
3100 * slowing down file operations.
3101 */
3102 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
3103 #define LEVELS 5
3104 char *path = strdup("test");
3105 char *dirs[LEVELS];
3106 int level;
3107 printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
3108 for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
3109 char *newpath = NULL;
3110 if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
3111 printf(" error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
3112 path, strerror(errno));
3113 break;
3114 }
3115 asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
3116 free(path);
3117 path = newpath;
3118 }
3119 return 0;
3120 }
3121
3122 /*
3123 * Test if symlinks can be created. This was a problem detected with
3124 * KDE.
3125 */
3126 int test_symlinks(void) {
3127 printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
3128 unlink("symlink");
3129 if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
3130 printf(" error: Unable to create symlink\n");
3131 return 0;
3132 }
3133
3134 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
3135 printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
3136 test_symlinks();
3137 test_subdirectory_creation();
3138 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
3139 test_sqlite_open();
3140 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
3141 test_gcompris_locking();
3142 return 0;
3143 }
3144 </pre>
3145
3146 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
3147 this:</p>
3148
3149 <pre>
3150 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
3151 info: testing symlink creation
3152 info: testing subdirectory creation
3153 info: sqlite worked
3154 info: testing fcntl locking
3155 Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
3156 Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
3157 Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
3158 Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
3159 Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
3160 Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
3161 </pre>
3162
3163 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
3164 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
3165 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
3166 the read-only lock (while Windows do not). Another was a bug in the
3167 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
3168 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
3169 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
3170 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
3171
3172 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
3173 it. :)</p>
3174
3175 </div>
3176 <div class="tags">
3177
3178
3179
3180 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>.
3181
3182 </div>
3183 </div>
3184 <div class="padding"></div>
3185
3186 <div class="entry">
3187 <div class="title">
3188 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
3189 </div>
3190 <div class="date">
3191 2010-08-09 20:15
3192 </div>
3193
3194 <div class="body">
3195
3196 <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
3197 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
3198 configuration settings on the clients. I believe the work to be
3199 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
3200 generated configuration.</p>
3201
3202 <p>What is the point, you might ask? The point is to allow a Debian
3203 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
3204 without any manual configuration.</p>
3205
3206 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
3207 the University of Oslo using PXE. With the PXE installation, I am
3208 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
3209 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
3210 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
3211 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret). After answering
3212 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
3213 after around 50 minutes it is done. I press enter to finish the
3214 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE. When the machine is
3215 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
3216 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
3217 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
3218 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop. At no point during
3219 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
3220 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
3221 fetched via DHCP and DNS. The roaming workstation is now ready for
3222 use.</p>
3223
3224 <p>How was this done, you might wonder? First of all, here is the
3225 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
3226 working properly out of the box:</p>
3227
3228 <ul>
3229 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
3230 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
3231 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
3232 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
3233 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
3234 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
3235 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
3236 </ul>
3237
3238 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)</p>
3239
3240 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
3241 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
3242 administrators to track their machines. Since yesterday, everything
3243 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
3244 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
3245
3246 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
3247 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
3248 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
3249 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
3250 /etc/apt/apt.conf. I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
3251 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
3252 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
3253 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
3254
3255 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
3256 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot. First the
3257 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain. If
3258 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead. If an
3259 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
3260 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
3261 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS. If there are several
3262 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
3263 LDAP subtree is used as the base. If defaultNamingContext is missing,
3264 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
3265 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
3266 such an object is used as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
3267 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
3268 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record. I've been unable to find a way to
3269 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
3270 current DNS domain is used.</p>
3271
3272 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
3273 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
3274 found. This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
3275 Oslo. A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
3276 server, but have not been implemented yet. I decided to fetch and
3277 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
3278 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
3279 log in nor the passwords required to log in. Usernames and passwords
3280 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
3281 network, and will not change as the laptop move around. For a
3282 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
3283 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much. Perhaps we
3284 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
3285
3286 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
3287 located when the user logs in for the first time. The LDAP server is
3288 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
3289 attribute is used if found. If it isn't found, the home directory
3290 path fetched from NSS is used instead. Assuming the path is of the
3291 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
3292 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
3293 smb://server.domain/username. This algorithm works for both Debian
3294 edu and the University of Oslo. Perhaps there are better attributes
3295 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
3296 do for now. :)</p>
3297
3298 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
3299 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
3300 more flexible than before. I suspect it will also work for thin
3301 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
3302 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
3303 yet.</p>
3304
3305 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
3306 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
3307
3308 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
3309 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
3310 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name. Will have to
3311 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
3312
3313 </div>
3314 <div class="tags">
3315
3316
3317
3318 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>.
3319
3320 </div>
3321 </div>
3322 <div class="padding"></div>
3323
3324 <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian edu.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14"></a></p>
3325
3326
3327
3328
3329 <div id="sidebar">
3330
3331 <h2>Archive</h2>
3332 <ul>
3333
3334 <li>2010
3335 <ul>
3336
3337 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
3338
3339 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
3340
3341 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
3342
3343 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
3344
3345 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
3346
3347 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
3348
3349 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
3350
3351 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (7)</a></li>
3352
3353 </ul></li>
3354
3355 <li>2009
3356 <ul>
3357
3358 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
3359
3360 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
3361
3362 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
3363
3364 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
3365
3366 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
3367
3368 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
3369
3370 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
3371
3372 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
3373
3374 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
3375
3376 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
3377
3378 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
3379
3380 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
3381
3382 </ul></li>
3383
3384 <li>2008
3385 <ul>
3386
3387 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
3388
3389 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
3390
3391 </ul></li>
3392
3393 </ul>
3394
3395
3396
3397 <h2>Tags</h2>
3398 <ul>
3399
3400 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (11)</a></li>
3401
3402 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
3403
3404 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
3405
3406 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (10)</a></li>
3407
3408 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (35)</a></li>
3409
3410 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (40)</a></li>
3411
3412 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (56)</a></li>
3413
3414 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (1)</a></li>
3415
3416 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (8)</a></li>
3417
3418 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (3)</a></li>
3419
3420 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
3421
3422 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (2)</a></li>
3423
3424 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
3425
3426 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (5)</a></li>
3427
3428 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (73)</a></li>
3429
3430 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (95)</a></li>
3431
3432 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (14)</a></li>
3433
3434 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (15)</a></li>
3435
3436 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (10)</a></li>
3437
3438 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (2)</a></li>
3439
3440 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
3441
3442 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (11)</a></li>
3443
3444 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (3)</a></li>
3445
3446 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (13)</a></li>
3447
3448 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (1)</a></li>
3449
3450 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (10)</a></li>
3451
3452 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (1)</a></li>
3453
3454 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (7)</a></li>
3455
3456 </ul>
3457
3458 </div>
3459 </body>
3460 </html>