Call for help with Ubuntu Server.

[Daniel Mons]

I'm running OpenLDAP + Samba + NFS + GOsa at a number of sites now, all 
on Ubuntu Feisty server side.

http://www.gosa-project.org/

These sites are all multi-OS at the client - Linux, Windows and Mac. 
They're mostly graphics, visual effects and TV type production places 
who all have suffered for years now with having three different networks 
within a building just to cater for three different operating systems. 
OpenLDAP+SAMBA+NFS+PAM-LDAP ties them all together nicely and ensures 
that user accounts and permissions are created and controlled centrally. 
GOsa is a brilliant tool that lets onsite helpdesk staff deal with the 
day-to-day management of users and permissions.

Integrating MacOSX into the fray was actually the most time consuming 
thing, as there are a lot of undocumented gotchas (eg: Mac users 
passwords must be stored as plaintext [not MD5 as default] and pushed 
through SASL2 for Macs to authenticate against).

Server side setup, including Mac frustrations, set me back about 20 
hours for the first go. After that, replicating it for other customers 
is about 2 hour's work tops. Client-side setup is less than 2 minutes 
for any Linux, Windows or Mac box. Generally the customers I have are 
quite shell focussed, so Windows takes a little longer to get up to 
speed with home folders mapping to the right place so that Cygwin fires 
up correctly and gives the same BASH environment as the Mac/Linux 
counterparts. For run of the mill desktop/email/word-processing users, 
that's not an issue.

When I get time I'll document the whole build process for server-side 
and each OS client onto a public Wiki somewhere. Work has been 
overwhelmingly busy at the moment, and sadly documentation has fallen by 
the wayside once again.

I'm not a programmer, so I can't really help with building tools to 
automate all of this terribly well. But I can document what I've done to 
make my system work, including gotchas and traps that tend to hold 
people back from getting a 100% working system across multiple client OSes.

-Dan


Rick Clark wrote:
> As I am sure everyone on this list knows.  Ubuntu has a long way to go
> in improving directory services clients and servers.  I would like to
> get started, but I will need help from the community, to do so. 
>
> I would like to try to get basic ldap authentication, into Gutsy.  I
> think this should be easy to do, and will help develop the groundwork
> and community needed fro gutsy+1, when hopefully, openldap2.4 or FDS
> packages will be ready.
>
> Please take a look at the following spec.
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LDAPAuthentication
>
> If anyone is willing to help, please send me a quick email.  Be sure to
> list how you can help.  i.e. packaging, scripting, testing, ... 
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rick Clark
> Technical Lead, Ubuntu Server Team
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/dendrobates
>
>
>
>