[debian-lan-devel] Debian-LAN: installing a complete network environment

[Andreas B. Mundt]

Hi Nico,

I am not sure if I do not get your message right, or if you did not
have a look at Debian-LAN and the links I provided at all.  ;-)

On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 09:28:22PM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Wait, I know? L:et's have it do dynamic DNS, host authentication, and LDAP
> based account management, too!

Indeed it does.  And in addition PXE installation, ICINGA and Munin
system monitoring of all machines, disk quota, a web proxy (Squid), a
package proxy (apt-cacher-ng), a local APT repository, etckeeper, a
firewall (shorewall), system backup, firewall (shorewall), customized
package selection, diskless workstations, roaming workstation
(off-line use possible), internal email, ...

All this is to my knowledge not part of Samba.

> And in 20 years, maybe it'll have 1/1000th
> the number of users that the Samba suite has right now, for all of that,
> especially including robust and tested Kerberos management with already
> tested tools!
>
> Sorry to rain on the parade, but Samba's been pretty good at this since
> Samba was invented in the early 1990's, and it's pretty stable. It also
> plays nicely with other well known network clients and protocols, such as
> Windows based and Mac based clients, so there's really no need to re-invent
> that wheel specifically in Debian. The Debian ports of Samba re up to date
> and quite stable.

Debian-LAN does not try to re-invent the wheel.  It provides a system
by taking available 'wheels', gluing them together with the necessary
configurations to make the building blocks work together nicely.  In
fact, one of the goals of Debian-LAN is to keep all modifications to
a standard Debian system as little as possible.  In an ideal world,
the installation of a set of (preseeded) Debian packages would be
sufficient.

Samba might be one of the components of the Debian-LAN system, taking
care about some of the services needed.  It is currently not used, but
if it turns out that it improves and/or simplifies the setup, nothing
can and should stop us from using it.

What do you think about the freeIPA project
<URL:http://www.freeipa.org>?

I guess we should move further discussions to the Debian-LAN mailing
list to not spam all the other lists by cross-postings.

Best regards,

     Andi