Re: Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu
[Petter Reinholdtsen 2010-04-28]
> 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.
Thank you for the very useful feedback from all of you. Based on this
thread and personal testing, the plan has been changed and modified
proposal has been implemented. :)
This profile is available in squeeze-test since yesterday. It only
have part of the solution in place, but this is how it is set up so
far:
* During installation, libpam-mklocaluser and sssd is installed and
configured to use LDAP and Kerberos.
* The wicd package is installed (instead of network-manager). Not
sure if this is a good idea or not, but the report from Extremadura
made me put it in there as a test.
* When a user in LDAP/Kerberos log in for the first time, a local
home directory is created in /home/ and a local user is created in
/etc/passwd to make sure this new home directory take effect. The
user is thrown out with a message asking her to log in again, and on
the second login the local user and home directory is used, and
password checking is done by sssd which caches LDAP and Kerberos
information when needed.
If this work well, we can provide it as part of the Squeeze release.
There are still pieces missing:
* Nothing is done with Printing.
* Nothing is done with file sync / backup.
* Nothing is done with mounting the network home directory from the
NFS/Samba server.
* Sudo is not set up to grant access for the local user. Not sure if
this should be done by default or not.
Happy hacking,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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