- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html">Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</a></div>
- <div class="date">2010-04-28 20:40</div>
- <div class="body">
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
- <li>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?</li>
-
- <li>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
- <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
- or the Fedora developed
- <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
- Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
-
- <li>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.</li>
-
- <li>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.</li>
-
- <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
- sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
-
- <li>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.</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-<p>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
-(<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) 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.</p>
-
-<p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
-please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
-
- Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
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