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        <channel>
                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged english</title>
                <description>Entries tagged english</description>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>

        
        <item>
                <title>The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
notes are available on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia&quot;&gt;the
Debian wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn&#39;t supported by the
totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
be the only one fitting our needs. :/&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 7 Dec 2008 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
finish it before the weekend was up.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
of these cards.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Software video mixer on a USB stick</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/&quot;&gt;Norwegian Unix User Group&lt;/a&gt; is
recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/&quot;&gt;dvswitch&lt;/a&gt; package from
the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
source, sink and mixer applications and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kinodv.org/&quot;&gt;dvgrab&lt;/a&gt;.  To allow this setup to
work without any configuration, I&#39;ve patched dvswitch to use
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.avahi.org/&quot;&gt;avahi&lt;/a&gt; to connect the various parts
together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goopen.no/&quot;&gt;Go Open 2009&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz&quot;&gt;The
USB image&lt;/a&gt; is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
larger stick as well.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>When web browser developers make a video player...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;As part of the work we do in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no&quot;&gt;NUUG&lt;/a&gt;
to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
will become easier when the &amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag is implemented in all
browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
&amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag, the &amp;lt;object&amp;gt; tag, the &amp;lt;embed&amp;gt; tag and
the &amp;lt;applet&amp;gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
finding the best options is a major challenge.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from &lt;a
href=&quot;http://labs.opera.com&quot;&gt;labs.opera.com&lt;/a&gt;, to see how it handled
a &amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
discover that I have to add the controls=&quot;true&quot; attribute to be able
to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
autoplay=&quot;true&quot; did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
&amp;lt;video&amp;gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
playing when the download is done.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/&quot;&gt;available
from the nuug site&lt;/a&gt;.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Using bar codes at a computing center</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
the &quot;missing&quot; computer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.libdmtx.org/&quot;&gt;libdmtx&lt;/a&gt; to write and read bar
code blocks as defined in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix&quot;&gt;The Data Matrix
Standard&lt;/a&gt;.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/&quot;&gt;a bar code
writer written in postscript&lt;/a&gt; capable of creating such bar codes,
but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
codes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
locations, and can detect movements and removals.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
easier automatic tracking of computers.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
status, I&#39;ve recently spent time on extending the machine register to
include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
parts from other machines or move the service to another old
machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
use LWP::Simple;
use POSIX;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use Date::Parse;
[...]
sub get_support_info {
    my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
    my $str;

    if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
        # fetch website from Dell support
        my $url = &quot;http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;amp;l=no&amp;amp;s=dhs&amp;amp;ServiceTag=$serial&quot;;
        my $webpage = get($url);
        return undef unless ($webpage);

        my $daysleft = -1;
        my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
        foreach my $line (@lines) {
            next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
            $line =~ s/&amp;lt;[^&gt;]+?&gt;/;/gm;
            $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;

            my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
            @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
            my $lastend = &quot;&quot;;
            while ($f[3] eq &quot;DELL&quot;) {
                my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];

                my $start = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                            localtime(str2time($startstr)));
                my $end = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                          localtime(str2time($endstr)));
                $str .= &quot;$type $start -&gt; $end &quot;;
                @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
                $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
            }
            my $today = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;, localtime(time));
            tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
                if ($lastend lt $today);
        }
    } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
        my $mech = WWW::Mechanize-&gt;new();
        my $url =
            &#39;http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do&#39;;
        $mech-&gt;get($url);
        my $fields = {
            &#39;BODServiceID&#39; =&gt; &#39;NA&#39;,
            &#39;RegisteredPurchaseDate&#39; =&gt; &#39;&#39;,
            &#39;country&#39; =&gt; &#39;NO&#39;,
            &#39;productNumber&#39; =&gt; $productnumber,
            &#39;serialNumber1&#39; =&gt; $serial,
        };
        $mech-&gt;submit_form( form_number =&gt; 2,
                            fields      =&gt; $fields );
        # Next step is screen scraping
        my $content = $mech-&gt;content();

        $content =~ s/&amp;lt;[^&gt;]+?&gt;/;/gm;
        $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
        $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
        $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;

        my $today = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;, localtime(time));

        while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
            my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
                m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
            $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
            my $start = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                        localtime(str2time($startstr)));
            my $end = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;,
                                      localtime(str2time($stopstr)));

            $str .= &quot;$type ($status) $start -&gt; $end &quot;;

            tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
                if ($end lt $today);
        }
    } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
        # This code ignore extended support contracts.
        my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
        if ($producttype &amp;amp;&amp;amp; $serial) {
            my $content =
                get(&quot;http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;amp;brandind=5000008&amp;amp;Submit=Submit&amp;amp;type=$producttype&amp;amp;serial=$serial&quot;);
            if ($content) {
                $content =~ s/&amp;lt;[^&gt;]+?&gt;/;/gm;
                $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
                $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
                $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;

                $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
                my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;

                $str .= &quot;($status) -&gt; $end &quot;;

                my $today = POSIX::strftime(&quot;%Y-%m-%d&quot;, localtime(time));
                tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
                    if ($end lt $today);
            }
        }
    }
    return $str;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
from dmidecode.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
print get_support_info(&quot;hp.host&quot;, &quot;HP ProLiant BL460c G1&quot;, &quot;1234567890&quot;
                       &quot;447707-B21&quot;);
print get_support_info(&quot;dell.host&quot;, &quot;Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950&quot;, &quot;1234567&quot;);
print get_support_info(&quot;ibm.host&quot;, &quot;IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-&quot;,
                       &quot;1234567&quot;);
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
do so.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;,
we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
specifications to cleam up this mess.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
(mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
new IETF work group?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
now. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
application.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
blocked from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
requirements change.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Recording video from cron using VLC</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 5 Apr 2009 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
  --sout=&quot;#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=&#39;$SAVEFILE&#39;},dst=nodisplay}&quot; \
  --intf=dummy&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
duplicating the output stream to &quot;nodisplay&quot; and the file, using the
dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
sure no X interface is needed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
&lt;tt&gt;vlc-record&lt;/tt&gt; to use from &lt;tt&gt;at&lt;/tt&gt; or &lt;tt&gt;cron&lt;/tt&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;#!/bin/sh
set -e
URL=&quot;$1&quot;
SAVEFILE=&quot;$2&quot;
DURATION=&quot;$3&quot;
DISPLAY= vlc -q &quot;$URL&quot; \
  --sout=&quot;#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=&#39;$SAVEFILE&#39;},dst=nodisplay}&quot; \
  --intf=dummy &lt; /dev/null &gt; /dev/null 2&gt;&amp;1 &amp;
pid=$!
sleep $DURATION
kill $pid
wait $pid&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>No patch is not better than a useless patch</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Julien Blache
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214&quot;&gt;claim that no
patch is better than a useless patch&lt;/a&gt;.  I completely disagree, as a
patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
properties.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 2 May 2009 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
do not yet know them.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The first one is &lt;a href=&quot;http://valgrind.org/&quot;&gt;valgrind&lt;/a&gt;, a
tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run &#39;valgrind program&#39;,
and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
to report the source file name and line number where the problem
occurs.  It can report things like &#39;reading past memory block in file
X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M&#39;, and
&#39;using uninitialised value in control logic&#39;.  This tool has made it
trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.

&lt;p&gt;The second one is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity&quot;&gt;Coverity&lt;/a&gt; which is
a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
and the company behind it is running
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scan.coverity.com/&quot;&gt;a community service&lt;/a&gt; for the
free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like &#39;lock L taken in file
X line N is never released if exiting in line M&#39;, or &#39;the code in file
Y lines O to P can never be executed&#39;.  The projects included in the
community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
reliability problems thanks to Coverity.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
surrounded by today.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
funded
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint&quot;&gt;developer
gathering&lt;/a&gt;. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
boot:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Use dash as /bin/sh.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
   clock is in UTC.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Install and activate the insserv package to enable
   &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
   based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt;, and enable concurrent booting.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
&lt;a href=&quot;http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/&quot;&gt;Carlos
Villegas&lt;/a&gt;.

&lt;p&gt;Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
using this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
this would be to enable insserv and run &#39;mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
insserv&#39;.  Will need to test if that work. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Taking over sysvinit development</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
the package up to date.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
upstream project at &lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.nongnu.org/&quot;&gt;Savannah&lt;/a&gt;, and continue
development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
working on the future release.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
non-predictable kernel in the early boot.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>ISO still hope to fix OOXML</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 8 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a
href=&quot;http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html&quot;&gt;a
blog post from Torsten Werner&lt;/a&gt;, the current defect report for ISO
29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
seminar this autumn.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
&#39;filetype:odt&#39; and equvalent terms, and got these results:&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:282000&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:308000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:75600&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:183000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:26500     &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:145000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next, I added a &#39;site:no&#39; limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
got these numbers:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:2480 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:4460&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:299   &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:741&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:187       &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:372&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I wonder how these numbers change over time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
search done from a machine here in Norway.&lt;/p&gt;


&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:129000&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:308000&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:44200&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:93900&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:26500     &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:82400&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;And with &#39;site:no&#39;:

&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th&gt;Type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;ODF&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th&gt;MS Office&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Tekst&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odt:2480&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;docx:3410&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Presentasjon&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;odp:175&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;pptx:604&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;Regneark&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;ods:186       &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;xlsx:296&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
numbers.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
further.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
configured to be a server for the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;SiteSummary
system&lt;/a&gt; I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
and Nagios configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
the machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
administrator need to run &quot;&lt;tt&gt;htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
nagiosadmin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot; to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
everything is taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; was finally
shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it even is time for some partying?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>After 6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 6 Mar 2010 18:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
package in 2004 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/230422&quot;&gt;#230422&lt;/a&gt;),
and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
Today, this finally paid off.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
a generic way that work with all display managers using this
framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.&lt;p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/&quot;&gt;Yesterdays
NUUG presentation&lt;/a&gt; about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
users and cryptographic keys instead.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
to work properly.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
up in a few days.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Great book: &quot;Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future&quot;</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
book titled &quot;Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
Copyright, and the Future of the Future&quot; is available with few
restrictions on the web, for example from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://craphound.com/content/&quot;&gt;his own site&lt;/a&gt;. I read the
epub-version from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883&quot;&gt;feedbooks&lt;/a&gt; using
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fbreader.org/&quot;&gt;fbreader&lt;/a&gt; and my N810. I
strongly recommend this book.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
and go.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
The setup would consist of the following:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
   the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
   the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
   server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
   central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
   request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
   automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
   and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
   hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
   request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
   can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
   the fish protocol in KDE?&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
   authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
   to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
   to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html&quot;&gt;libpam-ccreds&lt;/a&gt;
   or the Fedora developed
   &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD&quot;&gt;System
   Security Services Daemon&lt;/a&gt; packages.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
   using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
   directory, using unison.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
   their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
   the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
   system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
   implemented.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
   sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
   cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
   local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/566718&quot;&gt;#566718&lt;/a&gt;) and nslcd (or
perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Forcing new users to change their password on first login</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 2 May 2010 13:47:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
change the password on the first login attempt.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
settings in /etc/shadow:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
root@tjener:~# chage -l test
Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
Password expires                                        : never
Password inactive                                       : never
Account expires                                         : never
Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
root@tjener:~#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
intended:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
root@tjener:~# chage -l test
Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
Password expires                                        : never
Password inactive                                       : never
Account expires                                         : never
Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
root@tjener:~#  
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
sure only the user itself have the account password?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
Squeeze, and &#39;&lt;tt&gt;chage -d 0 username&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; do work there.  I have not
tested it on Lenny yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
equivalent command to expire a password is &#39;&lt;tt&gt;passwd -e
username&lt;/tt&gt;&#39;, which insert zero into the date of the last password
change.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 6 May 2010 23:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
to test your Squeeze system, make sure
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is enabled, and add this line to
/etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
CONCURRENCY=makefile
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
/etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
/etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
make this happen.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
the package maintainers to fix it. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
fix the remaining issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The last few days a new boot system called
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd&quot;&gt;systemd&lt;/a&gt;
has been
&lt;a href=&quot;http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html&quot;&gt;introduced&lt;/a&gt;

to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://upstart.ubuntu.com/&quot;&gt;upstart&lt;/a&gt;, and might prove to be
a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
based boot system.  Tollef is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/580814&quot;&gt;in the process&lt;/a&gt; of getting
systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
at the moment do not.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
way forward.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, based on the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt; regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
with parallel booting enabled by default.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;sitesummary
system&lt;/a&gt; is used to keep track of the machines in the school
network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
to update the DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
this on the collector host:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
perl -MSiteSummary -e &#39;for_all_hosts(sub { print join(&quot; &quot;, get_macaddresses(shift)), &quot;\n&quot;; });&#39;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
written yet.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
expected, if I am to believe the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt;, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
version.&lt;/p&gt;

More information about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
CONCURRENCY=none
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 19:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html&quot;&gt;libpam-mklocaluser&lt;/a&gt;
package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
into unstable.  The
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html&quot;&gt;pam-python&lt;/a&gt;
package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html&quot;&gt;sssd&lt;/a&gt; package
passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html&quot;&gt;libpam-ccreds&lt;/a&gt;
package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
for nscd in &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/485282&quot;&gt;BTS report
#485282&lt;/a&gt; is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
care of the caching of passwords and group information.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
find time to make sure the next release will include both the
Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
and I am sure we will find a good solution.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
on the home directory servers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
definitely helped freeing some time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
/cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
going to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
&quot;external&quot; media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
/cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
issues are known and should be solved:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The wicd package seen to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/508289&quot;&gt;break NFS mounting&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/581586&quot;&gt;network setup&lt;/a&gt; when
parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
seem to be on the case.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The nvidia X driver seem to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;have a race condition&lt;/a&gt;
triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
maintainer is on the case.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/575080&quot;&gt;try to switch back&lt;/a&gt; to
sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
/etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
sysv-rc get a working shutdown.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 1 Jun 2010 17:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
wait.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I came across two bugs related to this issue,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;#583312&lt;/a&gt; initially filed
against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/524751&quot;&gt;#524751&lt;/a&gt; initially filed against
kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 3 Jun 2010 12:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
the Skolelinux build servers:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
  vendor                    count
  Dell Computer Corporation     1
    PowerEdge 1750              1
  IBM                           1
    eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
  Intel                         2
  [no-dmi-info]                 3
maintainer:~#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
information listed with Intel as vendor and mo model, and virtual Xen
machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
option to list the individual machines.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A larger list is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/&quot;&gt;available from the the
city of Narvik&lt;/a&gt;, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
collector.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>A manual for standards wars...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 14:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Via the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html&quot;&gt;blog
of Rob Weir&lt;/a&gt; I came across the very interesting essay named
&lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf&quot;&gt;The Art of
Standards Wars&lt;/a&gt; (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
following the standards wars of today.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
script is running under upstart, and when it is not.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
COLUMNS):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=
RUNLEVEL=
runlevel=S
UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
UPSTART_INSTANCE=
UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
script.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=N
RUNLEVEL=S
runlevel=S
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
choice.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
have been discovered and reported in the process
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585410&quot;&gt;#585410&lt;/a&gt; in nagios3-cgi,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584879&quot;&gt;#584879&lt;/a&gt; already fixed in
enscript and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; in
kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
am working on a script to automate the test.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
(only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
is created.  The bug report
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/566000&quot;&gt;#566000&lt;/a&gt; make me suspect
this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/&quot;&gt;known
issue&lt;/a&gt; and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
Debian Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
script, which I call &lt;tt&gt;upgrade-test&lt;/tt&gt; for now, is doing the
trick:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
set -ex

if [ &quot;$1&quot; ] ; then
    desktop=$1
else
    desktop=gnome
fi

from=lenny
to=squeeze

exec &amp;lt; /dev/null
unset LANG
mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
fuser -mv .
debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
cat &gt; $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 101
EOF
chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
exit_cleanup() {
    umount $tmpdir/proc
}
mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
# Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT

chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils

# Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
# to return the correct answers.
echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
    chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections

# Include the desktop and laptop task
for test in desktop laptop ; do
    echo &gt; $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 2
EOF
    chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
done

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install

echo deb $mirror $to main &gt; $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
fuser -mv
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
kdebase-workspace-data&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
(KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
packages.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;My
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;testing
of Debian upgrades&lt;/a&gt; from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I&#39;ve
finally made the upgrade logs available from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&lt;/a&gt;.
I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
I will only focus on their removal plans.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
too surprising.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
&#39;&lt;tt&gt;echo &gt;&gt; /proc/&lt;em&gt;pidofdpkg&lt;/em&gt;/fd/0&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; to tell dpkg to
continue.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get gnome 72&lt;/b&gt;
&lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
  gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
  iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
  libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
  nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
  serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
  xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
  xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
  xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
  xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
  xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
  xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
  xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
  xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
  xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
  xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
  xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude gnome 129&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
  djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
  gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
  gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
  libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
  libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
  libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
  libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
  libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
  libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
  libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
  libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
  libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
  libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
  libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
  libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
  libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
  libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
  libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
  libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
  libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
  openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
  python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
  python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
  python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
  swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
  xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
  zip&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get kde 82&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;br&gt;cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
  kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
  kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
  kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
  kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
  libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
  xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
  xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
  xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
  xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
  xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
  xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
  xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
  xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
  xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
  xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude kde 192&lt;/b&gt;
&lt;br&gt;bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
  djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
  ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
  kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
  kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
  kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
  kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
  kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
  kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
  kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
  klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
  kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
  krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
  ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
  kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
  kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
  libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
  libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
  libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
  libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
  libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
  libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
  libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
  libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
  libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
  libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
  libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
  libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
  libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
  openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
  superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
  texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
  xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;

</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Officeshots taking shape</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;For those of us caring about document exchange and
interoperability, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.officeshots.org/&quot;&gt;OfficeShots&lt;/a&gt;
is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
&lt;a href=&quot;http://browsershots.org/&quot;&gt;BrowserShots&lt;/a&gt; is for web
pages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
see how the project is doing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
Windows.  This is great.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
this:

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
tasksel --new-install
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
any output what so ever.

Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
code like this:

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
cmd=&quot;$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed &#39;s/debconf-apt-progress -- //&#39;)&quot;
$cmd
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The content of $cmd is typically something like &quot;&lt;tt&gt;aptitude -q
--without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
~pimportant&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;, which will install the gnome desktop task, the
laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
important, just like tasksel would have done it during
installation.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
like this.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</title>
                <link>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</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">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</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:35:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;A while back, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;complained
about the fact&lt;/a&gt; that it is not possible with the provided schemas
for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00&quot;&gt;DHCP
schema&lt;/a&gt; to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
available today from IETF.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
--- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
+++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
@@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
 objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
        NAME &#39;dhcpHost&#39;
        DESC &#39;This represents information about a particular client&#39;
-       SUP top
+       SUP top AUXILIARY
        MUST cn
        MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
        X-NDS_CONTAINMENT (&#39;dhcpService&#39; &#39;dhcpSubnet&#39; &#39;dhcpGroup&#39;) )
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://luma.sourceforge.net/&quot;&gt;LUMA&lt;/a&gt;, which has proved to
be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
released.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/&quot;&gt;ldapvi&lt;/a&gt; for that.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html&quot;&gt;gq&lt;/a&gt; package as a
useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 1 Jul 2010 11:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir&lt;/h2&gt;

This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/568577&quot;&gt;bug #568577&lt;/a&gt; is in the
archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These packages need to be installed and configured&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I&#39;ve been unable to get TLS
certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
on how to get this working.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
caching until &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/485282&quot;&gt;bug #485282&lt;/a&gt;
is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
instructions I found in the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/&quot;&gt;LDAP for Mobile Laptops&lt;/a&gt;
instructions by Flyn Computing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
        debug-level             0
        reload-count            unlimited
        paranoia                no

        enable-cache            passwd          yes
        positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
        negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
        suggested-size          passwd          211
        check-files             passwd          yes
        persistent              passwd          yes
        shared                  passwd          yes
        max-db-size             passwd          33554432
        auto-propagate          passwd          yes

        enable-cache            group           yes
        positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
        negative-time-to-live   group           20
        suggested-size          group           211
        check-files             group           yes
        persistent              group           yes
        shared                  group           yes
        max-db-size             group           33554432
        auto-propagate          group           yes

        enable-cache            hosts           no
        positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
        negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
        suggested-size          hosts           211
        check-files             hosts           yes
        persistent              hosts           yes
        shared                  hosts           yes
        max-db-size             hosts           33554432

        enable-cache            services        yes
        positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
        negative-time-to-live   services        20
        suggested-size          services        211
        check-files             services        yes
        persistent              services        yes
        shared                  services        yes
        max-db-size             services        33554432
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
automatically like the one provided in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/496915&quot;&gt;bug #496915&lt;/a&gt;, the file
content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
look like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
passwd:         files ldap
group:          files ldap
shadow:         files ldap
hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
networks:       files
protocols:      files
services:       files
ethers:         files
rpc:            files
netgroup:       files ldap
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
shadow and netgroup.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
directory created and have the password as well as user and group
attributes cached.

&lt;h2&gt;LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
  libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
problems doing proper caching, I&#39;ve seen suggestions and recipes to
use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
discovered sssd.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/&quot;&gt;sssd&lt;/a&gt; package from Redhat.
It is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freeipa.org/&quot;&gt;FreeIPA&lt;/A&gt; project
to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html&quot;&gt;sssd package&lt;/a&gt;
was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
version 1.2 is now in testing.

&lt;p&gt;These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
roaming setup I want&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
&lt;tt&gt;/etc/sssd/sssd.conf&lt;/tt&gt;.

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
[sssd]
config_file_version = 2
reconnection_retries = 3
sbus_timeout = 30
services = nss, pam
domains = INTERN

[nss]
filter_groups = root
filter_users = root
reconnection_retries = 3

[pam]
reconnection_retries = 3

[domain/INTERN]
enumerate = false
cache_credentials = true

id_provider = ldap
auth_provider = ldap
chpass_provider = ldap

ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
ldap_tls_reqcert = never
ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
&quot;ldap_tls_reqcert = never&quot; to get it working.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
modify it manually.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 3 Jul 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Here is a short update on my &lt;a
href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;my
Debian Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrade testing&lt;/a&gt;.  Here is a summary of the
difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I&#39;m
not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
aptitude try because of missing conflicts
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585716&quot;&gt;#585716&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
publish the difference.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
  libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
  libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
  libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
  libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
  python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
  python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
  gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
  libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
  libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
  libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
  libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
  libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
  libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
  libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
  libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
  libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
  libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
  libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
  libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
  libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
  libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
  libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
  mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
  python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
  xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
  xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
  xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
  xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
  xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
  xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
  xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
  xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
  xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
  xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
  xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
&lt;a href=&quot;http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120&quot;&gt;changed
in git&lt;/a&gt; today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
the difference somewhat.
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 9 Jul 2010 12:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Since
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html&quot;&gt;my
last post&lt;/a&gt; about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
&lt;a href=&quot;http://jxplorer.org/&quot;&gt;jXplorer&lt;/a&gt; is claimed to be capable of
moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html&quot;&gt;available in
Debian&lt;/a&gt; testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
LTSP clients.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
in a &quot;computer&quot; LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
#
# Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
#
# Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
# the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
# ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
#
# This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
# existence of attribute names.
#
# The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
# ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
# To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
#
# Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
# configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
# 
# objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME &#39;ltspClientAux&#39;
#     SUP top
#     AUXILIARY
#     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )

LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
if [ &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; ] ; then
    LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
    for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk &#39;{print $5}&#39;|sort -u) ; do
        filter=&quot;(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))&quot;
        ldapsearch -h &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; -b &quot;$LDAPBASE&quot; -v -x &quot;$filter&quot; | \
            grep &#39;^ltspConfig&#39; | while read attr value ; do
            # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
            attr=$(echo $attr | sed &#39;s/^ltspConfig//i&#39; | tr a-z A-Z)
            # bass value on to clients
            eval &quot;$attr=$value; export $attr&quot;
        done
    done
fi
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html&quot;&gt;PC
Xperience, Inc., 2000&lt;/a&gt;.  I found its
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/&quot;&gt;files&lt;/a&gt; on a
personal home page over at redhat.com.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
information finally found a solution that seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
to a slave DNS server.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
I&#39;ve written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
  dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
  cn: hostname
  objectClass: dhcphost
  objectclass: domainrelatedobject
  objectclass: dnsdomainaux
  associateddomain: hostname.intern
  arecord: 10.11.12.13
  dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
  dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
  ldapconfigsound: Y
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
outside the &quot;DHCP Config&quot; subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
that.  If I can&#39;t figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
(which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
might be a good place to put it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;This is a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;followup&lt;/a&gt;
on my
&lt;a href=&quot;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&quot;&gt;previous
work&lt;/a&gt; on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html&quot;&gt;merging
all&lt;/a&gt; the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;powerdns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend&quot;&gt;Clues
on how to&lt;/a&gt; set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
the web.

&lt;p&gt;PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
One &quot;strict&quot; mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
using the same LDAP objects, and a &quot;tree&quot; mode where the forward and
reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
base, and uses a &quot;base&quot; scoped search for the DNS name by adding
&quot;dc=tjener,dc=intern,&quot; to the base with a filter for
&quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; for the forward entry and
&quot;dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,&quot; with a filter for
&quot;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&quot; for the reverse entry.  For
forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
ldapsearch commands could look like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp

ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&#39;
  dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
  hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
  srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
also exist.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: tjener
arecord: 10.0.2.2
associateddomain: tjener.intern

dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain2
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: 2
ptrrecord: tjener.intern
associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
forward DNS entries, it is doing a &quot;subtree&quot; scoped search with the
same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
&quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; and requests the attributes dnsttl,
arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
subtree scoped search but this time the filter is &quot;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&quot;
and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
instead.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp

ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  &#39;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&#39; associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
reverse lookups.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
objectclass that provide the needed attributes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
classes with the object classes used by DHCP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
(zonename and relativedomainname).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
objectclass ( some-oid NAME &#39;dnsDomainAux&#39;
    SUP top
    AUXILIARY
    MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
          DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
          TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
          NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
          A6Record $ DNAMERecord
    ))
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I&#39;ve sent an email to the PowerDNS
developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ISC dhcp&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
what is needed without having to read the source code.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
stored.  These are the relevant entries from
/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldap-base-dn &quot;dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot;;
ldap-dhcp-server-cn &quot;dhcp&quot;;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
configuration it need.  The cn &quot;dhcp&quot; is located using the given LDAP
base and the filter &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))&quot;.  The
search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: dhcp
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpServer
dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
is located using a base scope search with base &quot;cn=DHCP
Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; and filter
&quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))&quot;.
The search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: DHCP Config
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpService
objectClass: dhcpOptions
dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
dhcpStatements: authoritative
dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
related computer objects.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
scoped search with &quot;cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; as
the base and &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
00:00:00:00:00:00))&quot; as the filter.  This is what a host object look
like:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
structural object class.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its &quot;tree&quot; mode is rigid when it
come to the the LDAP structure, the &quot;strict&quot; mode is very flexible,
allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
in the configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
structure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
this might work for Debian Edu:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ou=services
  cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
    cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
    cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
      cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;P&gt;This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
like this:&lt;/p&gt;
    
&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dc: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
objectclass: dnsDomainAux
associateddomain: hostname.intern
arecord: 10.11.12.13
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;/p&gt;One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
auxiliary object class.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;Thanks to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home&quot;&gt;todays
opengeodata blog entry&lt;/a&gt;, I just discovered that the
OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
&lt;a href=&quot;http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT&quot;&gt;support
for calculating routes&lt;/a&gt;.  The support is still experimental and
only available from the development server, until more experience is
gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
was provided by &lt;a href=&quot;http://maps.cloudmade.com/&quot;&gt;Cloudmade&lt;/a&gt;,
but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
the issue.  I&#39;ve had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
www.openstreetmap.org front page.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
getting rid of password questions one at the time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
up. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
release another day.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
completed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
language of choice, please let us know too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
much.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Changes compared to the lenny based version&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Everything from Debian Squeeze
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Desktop environment KDE 4.4 =&gt; the new KDE desktop in
         combination with some new artwork
  &lt;li&gt;Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
  &lt;li&gt;OpenOffice.org 3.2
  &lt;li&gt;Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
  &lt;li&gt;Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
  &lt;li&gt;Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
  &lt;li&gt;Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
  &lt;li&gt;Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
  &lt;li&gt;3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
  &lt;li&gt;Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
    Enabled for:
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;PAM
  &lt;li&gt;LDAP
  &lt;li&gt;IMAP
  &lt;li&gt;SMTP (sender verification)
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
    fetched from LDAP.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;General cleanup (not finished)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The following features are not working as they should&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
    scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
    for testing.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
    and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
    clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
    netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
    some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
    jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Some packages lack translations. See
    http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
    and help out with translations.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&quot;&gt;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&quot;&gt;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To download this multiarch dvd release you can use&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&quot;&gt;ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&quot;&gt;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
get closer to the final release.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The MD5SUM of these images are&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The SHA1SUM of these images are&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;How to report bugs:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;I discovered this while doing
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;automated
testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze&lt;/a&gt;.  A few packages
in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An example is from todays
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt&quot;&gt;upgrade
of KDE using aptitude&lt;/a&gt;.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
because its dependencies are unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
 perl-modules depends on perl (&gt;= 5.10.1-1); however:
  Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/527917&quot;&gt;reported as a bug&lt;/a&gt;, and will
hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
of dependency loops.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html&quot;&gt;the
tireless effort by Bill Allombert&lt;/a&gt;, the number of circular
dependencies
&lt;a href=&quot;http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html&quot;&gt;left in Debian
is dropping&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Todays testing also exposed a bug in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590605&quot;&gt;update-notifier&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590604&quot;&gt;different behaviour&lt;/a&gt; between
apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
it.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 3 Aug 2010 23:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
servers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
/etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
(/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
.uio.no.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
university servers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
uses.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 7 Aug 2010 14:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html&quot;&gt;tried
to install&lt;/a&gt; a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
/etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
gave it a IP address.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
_ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
uppercase version of $domain.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
but SMB mounting still do not work. :(&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
with UID and GID values.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 8 Aug 2010 21:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>
&lt;p&gt;A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
/*
 * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
 * directory.
 * License: GPL v2 or later
 * 
 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
*/

#define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
#define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
#define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1

#define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */

#include &amp;lt;errno.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;fcntl.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;stdio.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;string.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;stdlib.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;sys/file.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;sys/stat.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;sys/types.h&gt;
#include &amp;lt;unistd.h&gt;

#ifdef TEST_SQLITE
/*
 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
 * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
 * below.
 * See also &amp;lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 &gt;.
 */
#include &amp;lt;sqlite3.h&gt;
#define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
  &quot;CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); &quot;
int test_sqlite_open(void) {
  char *zErrMsg;
  char *name = &quot;testsqlite.db&quot;;
  sqlite3 *db=NULL;
  unlink(name);
  int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &amp;db);
  if( rc ){
    printf(&quot;error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n&quot;, name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
  }

  /* create tables */
  rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &amp;zErrMsg);
  if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
    printf(&quot;error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n&quot;, zErrMsg);
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
  }
  printf(&quot;info: sqlite worked\n&quot;);
  sqlite3_close(db);
  return 0;
}
#endif /* TEST_SQLITE */

/*
 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
 * done in the sqlite3 library.
 * See also
 * &amp;lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html&gt; and the
 * POSIX specification
 * &amp;lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html&gt;.
 */
int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
  struct flock fl;
  char *name = &quot;testsqlite.db&quot;;
  unlink(name);
  int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
  printf(&quot;info: testing fcntl locking\n&quot;);

  fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
  fl.l_pid    = getpid();
  printf(&quot;  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
  fl.l_len    = 510;
  fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
  fl.l_len    = 510;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  printf(&quot;  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824&quot;);
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 2;
  fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &amp;fl) ) printf(&quot; - error!\n&quot;); else printf(&quot;\n&quot;);

  close(fd);
  return 0;
}

/*
 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
 * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
 * Mounting with option &#39;sync&#39; seem to solve this problem while
 * slowing down file operations.
 */
int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
#define LEVELS 5
  char *path = strdup(&quot;test&quot;);
  char *dirs[LEVELS];
  int level;
  printf(&quot;info: testing subdirectory creation\n&quot;);
  for (level = 0; level &amp;lt; LEVELS; level++) {
    char *newpath = NULL;
    if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
      printf(&quot;  error: Unable to create directory &#39;%s&#39;: %s\n&quot;,
             path, strerror(errno));
      break;
    }
    asprintf(&amp;newpath, &quot;%s/%s&quot;, path, &quot;test&quot;);
    free(path);
    path = newpath;
  }
  return 0;
}

/*
 * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
 * KDE.
 */
int test_symlinks(void) {
  printf(&quot;info: testing symlink creation\n&quot;);
  unlink(&quot;symlink&quot;);
  if (-1 == symlink(&quot;file&quot;, &quot;symlink&quot;))
    printf(&quot;  error: Unable to create symlink\n&quot;);
  return 0;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  printf(&quot;Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n&quot;);
  test_symlinks();
  test_subdirectory_creation();
#ifdef TEST_SQLITE
  test_sqlite_open();
#endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
  test_gcompris_locking();
  return 0;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When everything is working, it should print something like
this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
info: testing symlink creation
info: testing subdirectory creation
info: sqlite worked
info: testing fcntl locking
  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
it. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        </channel>
</rss>