* jonty grml@jonmail.co.uk [Sun Jan 02, 2011 at 03:01:23PM +0000]:
I have been using grml for the last couple of months. I am building a network of about 20 machines, all running grml, and I want them to share a single set of login names and passwords.
Nice! :)
So I decided to configure OpenLDAP as a service on one machine and configure the other machines to find login+password from this service.
I am following the instructions set out at:
http://wiki.debian.org/LDAP/NSS http://www.debian-administration.org/article/585/OpenLDAP_installation_on_De...
They suggest I use libnss-ldap. But this package seems to be missing from my copy of grml 2010.04. I have also checked the package list for 2010.12 and that does not contain libnss-ldap.
This seems a strange omission from grml. It contains slapd to run the service and several clients such as freeradius-ldap, libnet-ldap-perl, postfix-ldap, and smbldap-tools. So why not libnss-ldap?
libnss-ldap requires pre-configuration to be useful and no shipped package has a hard dependency on it, that's why it's not shipped by default.
I could install libnss-ldap on each client machine. But then I have to repeat those same steps on 20 machines, which makes it 20 times more likely I will make a mistake somewhere.
I tried "apt-get install libnss-ldap" on a test machine. This started updating libc-bin and installing locales, which seemed a good way of breaking the distro. Can anyone suggest a better approach? Should I remaster the CD? Is there some gmrl magic I am missing? Is there a different tool for login+password that is not ldap?
Just grab Grml 2010.12 (current stable release) and run "apt-get install libnss-ldap" there, no major updates (like libc) should be necessary then.
If you want to have libnss-ldap persistent you can either use http://wiki.grml.org/doku.php?id=persistency (not that great for 20 machines probably though), the debs=... bootoption to install it during bootup (see http://grml.org/cheatcodes/), remaster it using grml-live (see http://grml.org/grml-live/) or if PXE booting is an option provide the adjusted grml_chroot (either from grml-live or based on the official ones from http://debian.netcologne.de/www.grml.org/release-chroots/) through PXE.
regards, -mika-