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+ <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</title>
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+ <div class="title">
+ <h1>
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
+
+ </h1>
+
+ </div>
+
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</div>
+ <div class="date">2010-08-09 20:15</div>
+ <div class="body">
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
+<li>Web proxy URL.</li>
+<li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
+<li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
+<li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
+<li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
+<li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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. :)</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to help out with implementing these things 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 id="sidebar">
+
+<h2>Archive</h2>
+<ul>
+
+<li>2010
+<ul>
+
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
+
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+
+</ul></li>
+
+<li>2008
+<ul>
+
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
+
+</ul></li>
+
+</ul>
+
+
+
+<h2>Tags</h2>
+<ul>
+
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (11)</a></li>
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+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (35)</a></li>
+
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (40)</a></li>
+
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (55)</a></li>
+
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (1)</a></li>
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