Petter Reinholdtsen

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 the Debian wiki. 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'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.

For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to be the only one fitting our needs. :/

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.

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.

Etter flere års mislykkede forsøk på å skrive om byggesystemet for den norske stavekontrollen for bokmål og nynorsk til å ikke bruke bindestrek som ordskillemarkør, lyktes jeg endelig første juledag. Bruken av bindestrek som ordskillemarkør har gjort det umulig å få med ord med bindestrek i stavekontrolldatagrunnlaget, slik at ord som e-post og CD-spiller ikke kunne godtas av stavekontrollen. Hadde litt tid til overs å bruke på stavekontrollen, og satte meg ned med to kopier av byggsystemet og en liten testdatafil, og byttet ut - med = på utvalgte steder i byggsystemet og datafilen helt til jeg fikk samme resultat med det gamle og det nye byggsystemet. Dette tror jeg var forsøk 4, der de foregående har feilet uten at jeg klarte å forstå hvorfor. Det sier kanskje litt om kompleksiteten i det originale byggsystemet som Rune Kleveland laget i sin tid.

Etter å ha endret byggsystemet, var neste steg å importere ordene med bindestrek. Vi har en rekke slike i databasene for bokmål og nynorsk for korrektur av datagrunnlaget for stavekontrollen, og etter importen skulle nå 10350 nye ord bli godkjent som korrekt stavede ord av stavekontrollen.

Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut. Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få Skolelinux / Debian Edu ferdig oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken insserv.

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.

In Debian Edu/Skolelinux, 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.

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.

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.

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?

I'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. :)

Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen dager siden kom siste rapport, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige, BSA höftade Sverigesiffror, oppsummeres slik:

I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.

Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er BSA piracy figures need a shot of reality og Does The WIPO Copyright Treaty Work?

Fant lenkene via oppslag på Slashdot.

Under helgens utviklersamling i Skolelinux fikk jeg endelig satt meg ned sammen med Ronny Aasen i styret for å få et webbasert medlemsregister tilbake på plass for foreningen som passer på skolelinuxprosjektet. Etter flere års knot og problemer, er nå memberdb satt opp og klart til bruk. Import av det gamle medlemsregisteret har vist seg vanskelig, så alle medlemmer bes om å registrere seg på nytt. Hvis du støtter FRiSKs formål så er du hjertelig velkommen til å melde deg inn. Formålet lyder:

Linux i skolen skal tilrettelegge for og informere om bruk av fri programvare, i henhold til Debian Free Software Guidelines av 2002-02-03, i den norske skolen, slik som f.eks. Linux og GNU.

De færreste er klar over at Skolelinux-prosjektet kom som et resultat av en avgjørelse på årsmøtet i NUUG i 2000-06-29, der Håkon Wium Lie, da varamedlem i styret, tok på seg oppdraget om å starte et initiativ kalt "Teach the Teacher", som skulle være et initiativ for å få fri programvare og unix-lignende operativsystemer inn i Skolen. Tanken var at en måtte starte med lærerne for at ungene skulle få mulighet til å møte en bedre IT-hverdag. Jeg var tilstede på møtet, og hadde sans for ideen, men intet skjedde. På vårparten 2001 ble det arrangert en demonstrasjon i anledning at First Tuesday hadde invitert Microsoft til et møte for å fortelle om fremtidens Internet. Dette provoserte endel av oss, og EFN og NUUG tok initiativ til å arrangere en demonstrasjon utenfor lokalene 2001-05-21. Blant de som sto bak demonstrasjonen var Vidar Bakke fra NUUG og Håkon W. Lie fra EFN. Etter demonstrasjonen arrangerte Håkon en fest hjemme hos seg der alle som hadde vært aktive i demonstrasjonsplanlegging og gjennomføringen deltok. Før festen var jeg blitt lei av å vente på at Håkon skulle ta initiativ til "Teach the Teacher", og for å forsøke å få litt fremgang besteme jeg meg for å benytte anledningen hos Håkon til å snakke om behovet for å hjelpe skolene i gang med bedre datasystemer bestående av fri programvare og unix-lignende operativsystemer. Flere var interessert, og Knut Yrvin tenkte på ideen. Han ropte sammen til et stiftelsesmøte i prosjektet i sin arbeidsgivers Objectwares lokaler ved Ullevål stadion 2001-07-02, og jeg ble med. Resten er historie. :)

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.

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 SiteSummary system 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 "htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin" 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.

On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of Skolelinux 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.

Perhaps it even is time for some partying?

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.

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 (#230422), and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release. Today, this finally paid off.

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.

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.

Yesterdays NUUG presentation 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• 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?
• 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 libpam-ccreds or the Fedora developed System Security Services Daemon packages.
• 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.
• 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.
• For users that should have local root access to their laptop, sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.
• 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.

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 (#566718) 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.

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

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.

I'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.

A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these settings in /etc/shadow:

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:~#

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).

After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as intended:

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:~#  

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).

Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make sure only the user itself have the account password?

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

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 'chage -d 0 username' do work there. I have not tested it on Lenny yet.

Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an equivalent command to expire a password is 'passwd -e username', which insert zero into the date of the last password change.

In the recent Debian Edu versions, the sitesummary system 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.

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:

perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'

This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.

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.

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 input on debian-devel@, 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.

More information about dependency based boot sequencing 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:

CONCURRENCY=none

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 the list of usertagged bugs related to this.

Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new libpam-mklocaluser package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted into unstable. The pam-python package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the sssd package passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the libpam-ccreds package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.

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 BTS report #485282 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 "external" 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.

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.

If you want to discuss the details of these features, please contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.

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:

• The wicd package seen to break NFS mounting and network setup when parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer seem to be on the case.
• The nvidia X driver seem to have a race condition triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The maintainer is on the case.
• The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users try to switch back 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.

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.

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 the list of usertagged bugs related to this.

Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.

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.

I came across two bugs related to this issue, #583312 initially filed against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious that the nvidia drivers were involved, and #524751 initially filed against kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.

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.

I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.

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:

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:~#

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.

A larger list is available from the the city of Narvik, 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.

Via the blog of Rob Weir I came across the very interesting essay named The Art of Standards Wars (PDF 25 pages). I recommend it for everyone following the standards wars of today.

Det er merkelig hvordan myter om Skolelinux overlever. En slik myte er at Skolelinux ikke kan sentraldriftes og ha sentralt plasserte tjenermaskiner. I siste Computerworld Norge er IT-sjef Viggo Billdal i Steinkjer intervjuet, og forteller uten blygsel:

Vi hadde Skolelinux, men det har vi sluttet med. Vi testet om det lønte seg med Microsoft eller en åpen plattform. Vi fant ut at Microsoft egentlig var totalt sett bedre egnet. Det var store driftskostnader med Skolelinux, blant annet på grunn av desentraliserte servere. Det var komplisert, så vi gikk vekk fra det og bruker nå bare Windows.

En rask sjekk mot den norske brukerlista i Skolelinuxprosjektet forteller at Steinkjers forsøk foregikk fram til 2004/2005, og at Røysing skole i Steinkjer skal ha vært svært fornøyd med Skolelinux men at kommunen overkjørte skolen og krevde at de gikk over til Windows. Et søk på nettet sendte meg til Dagens IT nr. 18 2005 hvor en kan lese på side 18:

Inge Tømmerås ved Røysing skole i Steinkjer kjører ennå Microsoft, men forteller at kompetanseutfordringen med Skolelinux ikke var så stor. ­ Jeg syntes Skolelinux var utrolig lett å drifte uten forkunnskaper. Men man må jo selvsagt ha tilgang på ekstern kompetanse til installasjoner og maskinvarefeil, sier Tømmerås.

Som systemarkitekten bak Skolelinux, kan jeg bare riste på hodet over påstanden om at Skolelinux krever desentraliserte tjenere. Skolelinux-arkitekturen er laget for sentralisert drift og plassering av tjenerne lokalt eller sentralt alt etter behov og nettkapasitet. Den er modellert på nettverks- og tjenerløsningen som brukes på Universitetet i Tromsø og Oslo, der jeg jobber med utvikling av driftstjenester. Dette er det heldigvis noen som har fått med seg, og jeg er glad for å kunne sitere fra en kommentar på den overnevnte artikkelen. Min venn og gamle kollega Sturle Sunde forteller der:

I Flora kommune køyrer vi Skulelinux på skular med alt frå 15 til meir enn 500 elevar. Dei store skulane har eigen tenar, for det er mest praktisk. Eg, som er driftsansvarleg for heile nettet, ser sjeldan dei tenarane fysisk, men at dei står der gjer skulane mindre avhengige av eksterne linjer som er trege eller dyre. Dei minste skulane har ikkje eigen tenar. Å bruke sentral tenar er heller ikkje noko problem. Småskulane klarar seg fint med 1 mbit-linje til ein sentral tenar eller tenaren på ein større skule.

Det beste med Skulelinux er halvtjukke klientar. Dei treng ikkje harddisk og brukar minimalt med ressursar på tenaren fordi dei køyrer programma lokalt. Eit klasserom med 30 sju-åtte år gamle maskiner har mykje meir CPU og RAM totalt enn nokon moderne tenar til under millionen. Det trengst to kommandoar på den sentrale tenaren for å oppdatere alle klientane, både tynne og halvtjukke. Vi har ingen problem med diskar som ryk heller, som var eit problem før fordi elevane sat og sparka i maskinene. Og dei krev lite bandbreidde i nettet, so det er fullt mogleg å køyre slike på småskular med trege linjer mot tenaren på ein større skule.

Flora kommune har nesten 800 Linux-maskiner i sitt skulenett, og ein person som tek seg av drift av heile nettet, inkludert tenarar, klientar, operativsystem, programvare, heimekontorløysing og administrasjon av brukarar.

No skal det seiast at vi ikkje køyrer rein Skulelinux ut av boksen. Vi har gjort ein del tilpassingar mot noko Novell-greier som var der frå før, og som har komplisert installasjonen vår. Etter at oppsettet var gjort har løysinga vore stabil og kravd minimalt med arbeid.

Jeg vet at Narvik, Harstad og Oslo er kommuner der Skolelinux sentraldriftes med sentrale tjenere. Det forteller meg at Steinkjers IT-sjef neppe bør skylde på Skolelinux-løsningen for sine 5 år gamle minner.

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 (#585410 in nagios3-cgi, #584879 already fixed in enscript and #584861 in kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I am working on a script to automate the test.

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).

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 #566000 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 known issue 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.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test script, which I call upgrade-test for now, is doing the trick:

#!/bin/sh
set -ex

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

from=lenny
to=squeeze

exec < /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 > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d <<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 > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test <<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 > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
fuser -mv

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

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

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.

My testing of Debian upgrades from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've finally made the upgrade logs available from http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/. 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.

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?

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.

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 'echo >> /proc/pidofdpkg/fd/0' to tell dpkg to continue.

apt-get gnome 72
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

aptitude gnome 129
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

apt-get kde 82
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

aptitude kde 192
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

A while back, I complained about the fact 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.

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.

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.

Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change the DHCP schema to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas available today from IETF.

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

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.

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

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 LUMA, 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. :)

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.

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 ldapvi for that.

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.

Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the gq 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.

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.

LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir

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 bug #568577 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.

These packages need to be installed and configured

libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser

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'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.

Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline caching until bug #485282 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 LDAP for Mobile Laptops instructions by Flyn Computing.

	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

While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf automatically like the one provided in bug #496915, 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:

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

The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group, shadow and netgroup.

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.

LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir

Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have problems doing proper caching, I'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.

LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser

A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the sssd package from Redhat. It is part of the FreeIPA 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 sssd package was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and version 1.2 is now in testing.

These packages need to be installed and configured to get the roaming setup I want

libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser

The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating /etc/sssd/sssd.conf.

[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

I got the same problem here with certificate checking. Had to set "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.

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.

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

Here is a short update on my my Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing. Here is a summary of the difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when aptitude try because of missing conflicts (#584861 and #585716).

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.

Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

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

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

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

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

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

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-openchrome

I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was changed in git 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.

Since my last post about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application jXplorer 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 available in Debian 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.

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.

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.

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

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?

# 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 'ltspClientAux'
#     SUP top
#     AUXILIARY
#     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )

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

I'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. :)

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

Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by PC Xperience, Inc., 2000. I found its files on a personal home page over at redhat.com.

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.

I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this information finally found a solution that seem to work.

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.

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'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.

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:

  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

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.

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 "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do that. If I can'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.

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

This is a followup on my previous work on merging all the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.

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.

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.

powerdns

Clues on how to set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on the web.

PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend. One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" 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.

In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" 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:

ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' 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 '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
  dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
  hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
  srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp

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.

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

In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" 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 "(arecord=10.0.2.2)" 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.

The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch like this:

ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' 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 \
  '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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):

objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
    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
    ))

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'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.

ISC dhcp

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.

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:

ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";

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

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

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 "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))". The search result is this entry:

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

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.

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 "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look like:

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

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.

Conclusion

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

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.

Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like this might work for Debian Edu:

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)

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.

The combined object under the machines subtree would look something like this:

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

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step completed.

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.

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.

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.

Changes compared to the lenny based version

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

The following features are not working as they should

• 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.
• 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.
• The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.
• The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.
• The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.
• Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.
• 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.
• Some packages lack translations. See http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status, and help out with translations.

To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso

To download this multiarch dvd release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso

There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we get closer to the final release.

The MD5SUM of these images are

• 3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• 22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso

The SHA1SUM of these images are

• c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
• 2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso

How to report bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla

Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org

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.

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.

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.

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.

A few days ago, I tried to install 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.

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.

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.

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. :(

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.

If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

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.

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.

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:

/*
 * 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 <errno.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/file.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#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 <URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
 */
#include <sqlite3.h>
#define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
  "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
int test_sqlite_open(void) {
  char *zErrMsg;
  char *name = "testsqlite.db";
  sqlite3 *db=NULL;
  unlink(name);
  int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
  if( rc ){
    printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
  }

  /* create tables */
  rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
  if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
    printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
  }
  printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
  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
 * <URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
 * POSIX specification
 * <URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
 */
int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
  struct flock fl;
  char *name = "testsqlite.db";
  unlink(name);
  int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
  printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
 * slowing down file operations.
 */
int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
#define LEVELS 5
  char *path = strdup("test");
  char *dirs[LEVELS];
  int level;
  printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
  for (level = 0; level < LEVELS; level++) {
    char *newpath = NULL;
    if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
      printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
	     path, strerror(errno));
      break;
    }
    asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
    free(path);
    path = newpath;
  }
  return 0;
}

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

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

When everything is working, it should print something like this:

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

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.

Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need it. :)

Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in http://github.com/gebi/fs-test.

As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded configuration settings on the clients. I believe the work to be mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically generated configuration.

What is the point, you might ask? The point is to allow a Debian Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure without any manual configuration.

This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at the University of Oslo using PXE. With the PXE installation, I am asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret). After answering these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and after around 50 minutes it is done. I press enter to finish the installation, and the machine reboots into KDE. When the machine is ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop. At no point during this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the required configuration was dynamically detected using information fetched via DHCP and DNS. The roaming workstation is now ready for use.

How was this done, you might wonder? First of all, here is the list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it working properly out of the box:

• IP address/netmask and DNS server.
• Web proxy URL.
• LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).
• Kerberos server for PAM password checking.
• SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)
• Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)
• Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)

(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)

The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system administrators to track their machines. Since yesterday, everything but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.

The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual. When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local proxy present on the new network when it moves around.

The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related configuration are generated using DNS information at boot. First the installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain. If not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead. If an LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to determine which LDAP base to use for NSS. If there are several namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that LDAP subtree is used as the base. If defaultNamingContext is missing, the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with such an object is used as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record. I've been unable to find a way to look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the current DNS domain is used.

For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is found. This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of Oslo. A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary server, but have not been implemented yet. I decided to fetch and save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a different network does not change the set of users being allowed to log in nor the passwords required to log in. Usernames and passwords will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu network, and will not change as the laptop move around. For a non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is supposed to stay in place it should not matter much. Perhaps we should switch those to use sssd too?

The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is located when the user logs in for the first time. The LDAP server is consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath attribute is used if found. If it isn't found, the home directory path fetched from NSS is used instead. Assuming the path is of the form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form smb://server.domain/username. This algorithm works for both Debian edu and the University of Oslo. Perhaps there are better attributes to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will do for now. :)

This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even more flexible than before. I suspect it will also work for thin client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this yet.

If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name. Will have to implement it for Debian Edu. :)

My file system sematics program presented a few days ago is very useful to verify that a file system can work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit. I'm looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs. My friend Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian Edu, but stopped because of problems. I asked today what the problems where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly. Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing script:

mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
  mode_t retval = 0;
  int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
  if (-1 != fd) {
    unlink(name);
    struct stat statbuf;
    if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
      retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
    }
    close(fd);
  }
  return retval;
}

/* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
int test_umask(void) {
  printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");

  mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
  mode_t newmode;
  if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
    printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
           newmode);
  }
  umask(007);
  if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
    printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
           newmode);
  }

  umask (orig_umask);
  return 0;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  [...]
  test_umask();
  return 0;
}

Sure enough. On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:

Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
info: testing symlink creation
info: testing subdirectory creation
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
info: testing umask effect on file creation

When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this result:

Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
info: testing symlink creation
info: testing subdirectory creation
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
info: testing umask effect on file creation
  error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
  error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007

So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home directory.

Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in BTS report #594498

Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in http://github.com/gebi/fs-test.

Denne høsten skal endelig alle Osloskolene få mulighet til å bruke Skolelinux. Ny IT-løsning har vært rullet ut i noen måneder nå, og så vidt jeg fikk vite før sommeren skulle alle skoler ha nytt opplegg på plass før oppstart nå i høst. På alle skolene skal en kunne velge ved installasjon om en skal ha Windows eller Skolelinux på maskinene, og en kan i tillegg PXE-boote maskinene over nett som tynne klienter eller diskløse arbeidsstasjoner. Jeg er spent på hvor mange skoler som velger å ta i bruk Skolelinux, og gleder meg til å se hvordan dette utvikler seg. Løsningen leveres av Logica med Skolelinux Drift AS som underleverandør, og jeg har vært involvert i utviklingen av løsningen via Skolelinux Drift AS siden prosjektet starter. Jeg synes det er fantastisk at Skolelinux er kommet så langt siden vi startet i 2001 at alle elevene i Osloskolene nå skal få mulighet til å bruke løsningen. Jeg håper de vil sette pris på alle de fantastiske brukerprogrammene som er tilgjengelig i Skolelinux.

Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my previous post about sshfs. He reported another problem with sshfs. It fail to handle hard links properly. A simple way to spot this is to look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree. These should have a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1. I just tested to see what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:

% ln foo bar
ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
%

I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to avoid surprised unix programs. Not as useful as working file locking and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful nevertheless. :)

The latest version of the file system test code is available via git from http://github.com/gebi/fs-test

In the Debian popularity-contest numbers, the adobe-flashplugin package the second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package installed.

In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008 («Skolelinux i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs»), one of the most important problems schools experienced with Debian Edu/Skolelinux was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a good reason to stay with Windows.

I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web pages they want to visit.

This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7. The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus accept the new package into Squeeze.

Some updates.

My gnash pledge to raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of 10 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it. More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached. :)

On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code. It is called kcov, and can be used using kcov <directory> <binary>. It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.

Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for a new alpha release of Debian Edu, and just published the second alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu / Skolelinux release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows clients to get a Linux desktop on request.

Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu / Skolelinux DVD, which is supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu working using this DVD.

The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created a patch for debian-cd in BTS report #601203 to do this, and since this change was applied to the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.

A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that those needing these applications are few and can get them from the Debian archive.

Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages were using most space. A few large packages are well know; openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB. The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package. I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the free X driver should work.

With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the DVD more useful again.

Answering the call from the Gnash project for buildbot slaves to test the current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new releases out more often.

As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to, I have considered setting up a Debian/kfreebsd machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.

I'm still running upgrade testing of the Lenny Gnome and KDE Desktop, but have not had time to spend on reporting the status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.

I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else can see if anything should be changed.

This is for Gnome:

Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0 libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2 libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7 libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8 libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr zip

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 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 libgadu3 libgalago3 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 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0 libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl 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 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

[nothing]

This is for KDE:

Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++ libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex ttf-sazanami-gothic

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror

Most of the computers in use by the Debian Edu/Skolelinux project are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine. This was a bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.

I found a nice recipe to do this, and wrote the following script to do the migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.

#!/bin/sh

# Based on
# http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM

set -e
set -x

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <hostname>"
    exit 1
else
    host="$1"
fi

if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
    echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
    exit 1
fi

# Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))

img=$host.img
#dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD

parted $img mklabel msdos
parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
parted $img set 1 boot on

modprobe dm-mod
losetup /dev/loop0 $img
kpartx -a /dev/loop0

dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2

kpartx -d /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0

The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.

After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines seem to work just fine.

Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated upgrade testing of the Lenny Gnome and KDE Desktop to do apt-get autoremove when using apt-get. This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and can now present the updated result from today:

This is for Gnome:

Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

apache2.2-bin aptdaemon baobab binfmt-support browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cups-pk-helper dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more gnome-user-share gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf gtk2-engines-smooth hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libart2.0-cil libboost-date-time1.42.0 libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0 libcryptui0 libdiscid0 libelf1 libepc-1.0-2 libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard libfreerdp0 libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7 libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgpod-common libgpod4 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8 libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1 libsdl1.2debian libsrtp0 libssh-4 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0 media-player-info mesa-utils mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto nautilus-sendto-empathy p7zip-full pkg-config python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers python-elementtree python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell software-center system-config-printer-udev telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

cheese ekiga eog epiphany-extensions evolution-exchange fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit gedit-common gnome-games gnome-games-data gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnuchess gucharmap guile-1.8-libs libavahi-ui0 libdmx1 libgalago3 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0 liblircclient0 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libspeexdsp1 libsvga1 rhythmbox seahorse sound-juicer system-config-printer totem-common transmission-gtk vinagre vino

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

[nothing]

This is for KDE:

Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

ksmserver

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

kwin network-manager-kde

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

arts dolphin freespacenotifier google-gadgets-gst google-gadgets-xul kappfinder kcalc kcharselect kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager kdeartwork kdeartwork-emoticons kdeartwork-style kdeartwork-theme-icon kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeeject kdelibs kdeplasma-addons kdeutils kdewallpapers kdf kfloppy kgpg khelpcenter4 kinfocenter konq-plugins-l10n konqueror-nsplugins kscreensaver kscreensaver-xsavers ktimer kwrite libgle3 libkde4-ruby1.8 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10 libplasma-ruby libplasma-ruby1.8 libqt4-ruby1.8 marble-data marble-plugins netpbm nuvola-icon-theme plasma-dataengines-workspace plasma-desktop plasma-desktopthemes-artwork plasma-runners-addons plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets plasma-scriptengine-python plasma-scriptengine-qedje plasma-scriptengine-ruby plasma-scriptengine-webkit plasma-scriptengines plasma-wallpapers-addons plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement ruby sweeper update-notifier-kde xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

ark google-gadgets-common google-gadgets-qt htdig kate kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdepasswd kfind klipper konq-plugins konqueror ksysguard ksysguardd libarchive1 libcln6 libeet1 libeina-svn-06 libggadget-1.0-0b libggadget-qt-1.0-0b libgps19 libkdecorations4 libkephal4 libkonq4 libkonqsidebarplugin4a libkscreensaver5 libksgrd4 libksignalplotter4 libkunitconversion4 libkwineffects1a libmarblewidget4 libntrack-qt4-1 libntrack0 libplasma-geolocation-interface4 libplasmaclock4a libplasmagenericshell4 libprocesscore4a libprocessui4a libqalculate5 libqedje0a libqtruby4shared2 libqzion0a libruby1.8 libscim8c2a libsmokekdecore4-3 libsmokekdeui4-3 libsmokekfile3 libsmokekhtml3 libsmokekio3 libsmokeknewstuff2-3 libsmokeknewstuff3-3 libsmokekparts3 libsmokektexteditor3 libsmokekutils3 libsmokenepomuk3 libsmokephonon3 libsmokeplasma3 libsmokeqtcore4-3 libsmokeqtdbus4-3 libsmokeqtgui4-3 libsmokeqtnetwork4-3 libsmokeqtopengl4-3 libsmokeqtscript4-3 libsmokeqtsql4-3 libsmokeqtsvg4-3 libsmokeqttest4-3 libsmokeqtuitools4-3 libsmokeqtwebkit4-3 libsmokeqtxml4-3 libsmokesolid3 libsmokesoprano3 libtaskmanager4a libtidy-0.99-0 libweather-ion4a libxklavier16 libxxf86misc1 okteta oxygencursors plasma-dataengines-addons plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba plasma-widget-lancelot plasma-widgets-addons plasma-widgets-workspace polkit-kde-1 ruby1.8 systemsettings update-notifier-common

Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.

In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC. Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.

But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use mplayer in Debian Edu/Skolelinux. The reason is simple. We need a good browser plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I last tested the browser plugins available in Debian, the VLC plugin failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.

While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window. For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at what is going on.

On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux development gathering in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.

On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen, will hold its General Assembly for 2010. Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388 people registered as members. Last year 32 members cast their vote in the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to vote this year.

The last few days I have spent at work here at the University of oslo testing if the new batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few years the university have organized shared bid of a few thousand computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the university.

My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely have the time to do this for all the problems I find.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests I perform on a new model.

• Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
• Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after installation, X.org is working.
• Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second reported by the program.
• Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I normally test this by playing a HTML5 video in Firefox/Iceweasel.
• Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
• Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
• Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a picture from the v4l device show up.
• Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a few.
• For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE notice this.
• For laptops, is suspecd/hibernate working? I'm testing if the special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after resume.
• For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level, adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output, switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are not.
• Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers, acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their existence.

By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid, and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the framerate than RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.