K12Linux Meeting Summary: Friday, March 28th, 2008

Fri Mar 28 20:24:33 UTC 2008

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12linux-devel-list
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Participating
=============
<warren> Warren Togami, Red Hat, Fedora department
<pscheie> Peter Scheie, from Minneapolis, K12LTSP advocate & user
<dan_young> Dan Young, Multnomah Education Services District
<vagrantc> Vagrant Cascadian, one of the maintainers of LTSP in debian
<ogra> Oliver Grawert, edubuntu maintainer, ubuntu ltsp dev
<mccann> Jon McCann, Red Hat Engineer, GDM and ConsoleKit author and
maintainer
<cliebow> Chuck Liebow, Ellsworth Schools Maine
<mdomsch> Matt Domsch, Fedora Board, Dell
<spoleeba> Jef Spaleta, Fedora Board, U. of Alaska

LDM (LTSP Display Manager)
==========================
Background: LDM runs on the thin client, asks for a username and
password, then creates an ssh connection to the server.  If it is
successful in a user login, it runs a session (like /usr/bin/gnome-session)

* The locale bug where ldminfod overflowed ldm due to too many languages
from locale -a is fixed upstream, will be in the next Fedora build.
* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=435521 ConsoleKit LDM
support: Following through to see if ck-launch-session solves our problem.
* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=436912 ldm Xsession
support: There are some ideas of how to implement this properly upstream.
* Longer term (after F9) we will tackle the localization and
accessibility problems.  Warren will follow up with Jon Mccann to assess
the possibility of doing this via gdm intead.

LTSP Server
===========
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/K12Linux/InstallGuide
ltsp-server package and ltsp-build-client should be equally functional
on Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 at this point.  Let Warren know if you see any
problems.

Ugly Warnings during Thin Client Boot
=====================================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=359621
can't create lock file /etc/mtab/~994: Read-only file system (use -n
flag to override)
<warren> I eliminated most of them, but the ones involving /etc/mtab are
likely impossible to fix.
<vagrantc> warren: ah, we make /etc/mtab a symlink to /proc/mounts, and
i think mount is less noisy ... and we may also use the -n flag to
mount, not sure off the top of my head.

SELinux: Chroot Install/Update with Enforcing Mode
==================================================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=391451
<warren> So currently thin clients have selinux totally disabled.
<warren> We currently can't fix this for two reasons
<warren> 1) installing a chroot screws with the host kernel's selinux
policies, which is sometimes dangerous
<warren> 2) we currently only do NFS root boot, and selinux doesn't work
with NFS (?)
<warren> In the future I hope we can support selinux enforcing thin
clients, but that will likely only happen with NBD root.

(mkinitrd) implement NBD handling.
==================================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=424591
<warren> This task unfortunately will be deferred until after F9.  There
is simply too much work to be done.
<warren> Jeremy Katz wants nbd in initrd to be implemented as a mount -o
option, so it works exactly like loop mounts.
<warren> I can understand why my earlier nbd patches for mkinitrd were
rejected, because they want to do it correctly and more cleanly.
<warren> We will need to implement it for both nash mount and regular
mount so you can use syntax like:
<warren> mount -t squashfs 192.168.0.254:2000 -o ro,nbd /path/to/mountpoint
<warren> NBD is the kernel's network block device.
<warren> I aim to implement this before Fedora 10.
<warren> Also we plan on implementing a new DHCP option to direct the
client to the right NBD mount point.
<warren> I'm working with dcantrell who is part of the IETF DHCP group
(?) to write a RFC for this
<warren> something like:
<warren> option nbd-root "192.168.0.254:2000";
<warren> so the DHCP server can tell clients where to find the NBD, just
like DHCP can currently do with NFS roots today.

<warren> pscheie, if you install ltsp-server it defines
/etc/xinetd.d/nbdrootd I think
<warren> pscheie, basically nbdrootd serves a file or partition
containing whatever filesystem image to a defined port number

Fix pulseaudio launching for remote sound.
==========================================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=436906
Talked a bit with Lennart after the meeting.  The ticket has been
updated by Lennart with some advice.

Fix ltsp-server-initialize
==========================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=436907
<warren> ltsp-server-initialize is supposed to be a way to automatically
configure a server to be a LTSP server.  This is a lower priority for
me.  This is another great opportunity for somebody to get their feet
wet in LTSP development.

screen.d/xdmcp and screen.d/ldm should share X prep code.
=========================================================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=436910
<warren> oops.   this already done.  vagrantc did most of the work.
thanks vagrantc.

(ltspfs) Fix cdpinger segfault.
===============================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=436913
<warren> curiously I haven't seen this crash recently.  I'm not aware of
any fixes that went in.  Keep an eye out if you see it crash.
<warren> vagrantc is working on a different way to run cdpinger
on-demand via udev.  I'll be working with him on this because it is
better than the current way.

Implement non-PXE boot methods using mkelfimage.
================================================
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438103
<warren> I'm working on this now.  After talking with vagrantc yesterday
I decided to use the update-kernels script in ltsp-client with a few
modifications, like NOT touching pxelinux.cfg, yaboot and other boot
loader configs.
<warren> although dwmw2 claims it shouldn't be necessary to wrap kernel
and initrd to boot on linuxbios... going to explore that later.  Q-FUNK
of artecgroup is sending me a Thincan with linuxbios so I can do actual
testing later.

FL_TeacherTool
==============
http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/
http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/screenshot.html
robark says he will port fl_teachertool to K12Linux.

Fedora 9 Release Schedule
=========================
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/
This is the Fedora 9 development schedule.  This likely means we have
until April 7th to get bug fixes in for Fedora 9.

LTSP Development Training
=========================
We are meeting on Sunday, March 30th at 11AM EDT (1500 UTC) in
irc.freenode.net #ltsp for LTSP development training.
* Learn how to find and check out the LTSP source repositories.
* How to find things in the source checkout.
* How to edit things.
* How to build your own tarballs/RPMS for your testing.
* How to install your test RPMS on your server and client.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com