Category Archives: LTSP

Linux Terminal Server Project, make a Linux desktop a terminal server than can be used by network booted thin clients.

Edubuntu: The path to 14.04 LTS

(tl;dr: Edubuntu 14.04 will include a new Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu tablet edition with a lot of cool new features including a full feature Active Directory compatible domain.)

Now that Edubuntu 12.10 is out the door and the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen is just a week away, I thought it’d be an appropriate time to share our vision for Edubuntu 14.04.

This was so far only discussed in person with Jonathan Carter and a bit on IRC with other Edubuntu developers but I think it’s time to make our plans a bit more visible so we can get more feedback and hopefully get interested people together next week at UDS.

There are three big topics I’d like to talk about. Edubuntu desktop, Edubuntu server and Edubuntu tablet.

Edubuntu desktop

Edubuntu desktop is what we’ve been offering since the first Edubuntu release and what we’ll obviously continue to offer pretty much as it’s today.
It’s not an area I plan on spending much time working on personally but I expect Jonathan to drive most of the work around this.

Basically what the Edubuntu desktop needs nowadays is a better application selection, better testing, better documentation, making sure our application selection works on all our supported platforms and is properly translated.

We’ll also have to refocus some of our efforts and will likely drop some things like our KDE desktop package that hasn’t been updated in years and was essentially doubling our maintenance work which is why we stopped supporting it officially in 12.04.

There are a lot of cool new tools we’ve heard of recently and that really should be packaged and integrated in Edubuntu.

Edubuntu Server

Edubuntu Server will be a new addition to the Edubuntu project, expected to ship in its final form in 14.04 and will be supported for 5 years as part of the LTS.

This is the area I’ll be spending most of my Edubuntu time on as it’s going to be using a lot of technologies I’ve been involved with over the years to offer what I hope will be an amazing server experience.

Edubuntu Server will essentially let you manage a network of Edubuntu, Ubuntu or Windows clients by creating a full featured domain (using samba4).

From the same install DVD as Edubuntu Desktop, you’ll be able to simply choose to install a new Edubuntu Server and create a new domain, or if you already have an Edubuntu domain or even an Active Directory domain, you’ll be able to join an extra server to add extra scalibility or high-availability.

On top of that core domain feature, you’ll be able to add extra roles to your Edubuntu Server, the initial list is:

  • Web hosting platform – Will let you deploy new web services using JuJu so schools in your district or individual teachers can easily get their own website.
  • File server – A standard samba3 file server so all your domain members can easily store and retrieve files.
  • Backup server – Will automatically backup the important data from your servers and if you wish, from your clients too.
  • Schooltool – A school management web service, taking care of all the day to day school administration.

LTSP will also be part of that system as part of Edubuntu Terminal Server which will let you, still from our single install media, install as many new terminal servers as you want, automatically joining the domain, using the centralized authentication, file storage and backup capabilities of your Edubuntu Server.

As I mentioned, the Edubuntu DVD will let you install Edubuntu Desktop, Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu Terminal Server. You’ll simply be asked at installation time whether you want to join an Edubuntu Server or Active Directory domain or if you want your machine to be standalone.

Once installed, Edubuntu Server will be managed through a web interface driving LXC behind the scene to deploy new services, upgrade individual services or deploy new web services using JuJu.
Our goal is to have Edubuntu Server offer an appliance-like experience, never requiring any command line access to the system and easily supporting upgrades from a version to another.

For those wondering what the installation process will look like, I have some notes of the changes available at: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1289041/
I’m expecting to have the installer changes implemented by the time we start building our first 13.04 images.

The rest of Edubuntu Server will be progressively landing during the 13.04 cycle with an early version of the system being released with Edubuntu 13.04, possibly with only a limited selection of roles and without initial support for multiple servers and Active Directory integration.

While initially Edubuntu branded, our hope is that this work will be re-usable by Ubuntu and may one day find its way into Ubuntu Server.
Doing this as part of Edubuntu will give us more time and more flexibility to get it right, build a community around it and get user feedback before we try to get the rest of the world to use it too.

Edubuntu Tablet

During the Edubuntu 12.10 development cycle, the Edubuntu Council approved the sponsorship of 5 tablets by Revolution Linux which were distributed to some of our developers.

We’ve been doing daily armhf builds of Edubuntu, refined our package selections to properly work on ARM and spent countless hours fighting to get our tablet to boot (a ZaTab from ZaReason).
Even though it’s been quite a painful experience so far, we’re still planning on offering a supported armhf tablet image for 14.04, running something very close to our standard Edubuntu Desktop and also featuring integration with Edubuntu Server.

With all the recent news about Ubuntu on the Nexus 7, we’ll certainly be re-discussing what our main supported platform will be during next week’s UDS but we’re certainly planning on releasing 13.04 with experimental tablet support.

LTS vs non-LTS

For those who read our release announcement or visited our website lately, you certainly noticed the emphasis on using the LTS releases.
We really think that most Edubuntu users want something that’s stable, very well tested with regular updates and a long support time, so we’re now always recommending the use of the latest LTS release.

That doesn’t mean we’ll stop doing non-LTS release like the Mythbuntu folks recently decided to do, pretty far from that. What it means however is that we’ll more freely experiment in non-LTS releases so we can easily iterate through our ideas and make sure we release something well polished and rock solid for our LTS releases.

Conclusion

I’m really really looking forward to Edubuntu 14.04. I think the changes we’re planning will help our users a lot and will make it easier than ever to get school districts and individual schools to switch to Edubuntu for both their backend infrastructure with Edubuntu Server and their clients with Edubuntu Desktop and Edubuntu Tablet.

Now all we need is your ideas and if you have some, your time to make it all happen. We usually hang out in #edubuntu on freenode and can also be contacted on the edubuntu-devel mailing-list.

For those of you going to UDS, we’ll try to get an informational session on Edubuntu Server scheduled on top of our usual Edubuntu session. If you’re there and want to know more or want to help, please feel free to grab Jonathan or I in the hallway, at the bar or at one of the evening activities.

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, Edubuntu, LTSP, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | 10 Comments

Introducing the WebLive API

After working on it for the last two weeks, I’m proud to finally announce the WebLive API.
As a reminder, WebLive is the name used for the daemon, Drupal plugin and scripts used to run http://www.edubuntu.org/weblive
Since last week, all the code is now available here: https://launchpad.net/weblive

The API is exported over JSON and example code is available in the branch called ltsp-cluster-agent-vmmanager in the client directory. When interfacing with python, it’s recommended to use the “weblive.py” module as it’ll be updated should the JSON API change or be extended in the near future.

Exported functions are:

  • create_user(serverid, username, fullname, password, session)
  • list_everything()
  • list_locales(serverid)
  • list_packages(serverid)
  • list_servers()

The following functions are exported over authenticated XML-RPC (for management):

  • delete_user(serverid, username)
  • set_disabled(serverid,status)
  • list_users(serverid,all=False)

The main weblive instance is available at https://weblive.stgraber.org/weblive/json and is the one used by Edubuntu.

The drupal-weblive branch contains the Drupal module which is now just a client to the JSON API.

The first use of that API after the Drupal module is Natty’s software-center which since last week ships with code to connect to WebLive.
If you use up to date Natty, you’ll need to install “qtnx” from universe and then start: software-center –with-weblive

All the packages available in WebLive will then have a “Test drive” button you can click to test that app remotely from a WebLive server.

WebLive integration in software-center

The software-center integration is experimental and will hopefully be improved by the time Natty is released. As Ubuntu doesn’t ship qtnx by default, WebLive won’t be visible in the default Ubuntu install, though it’ll be for Edubuntu.

Note: It can take up to a minute to connect to a server. There’s currently no user feedback during the connection process unless you watch the terminal from which you started the software center.

The current code requires your username and hostname to be ascii lowercase alpha characters only. I posted instructions as a comment to get the development branch that doesn’t have this restriction.

Posted in Edubuntu, LTSP, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu, WebLive | Tagged | 12 Comments

Getting ready for IPV6

I’ve been regularly playing with IPV6 since mid-2006 when I first opened an account at SixXS ang got my first IPV6 tunnel up and running. Sadly at that point, there wasn’t much Point of Presence for tunnels, not even mentioning the state of native IPV6 networks…

Relatively recently my dedicated server provider started offering native IPV6 connectivity in their Nuremberg-based datacenter. They offer a /64 per server which should be plenty enough for most users and allows for stateless configuration of a single network. Unfortunately in my case, I’m running OpenVZ, LXC and KVM on that box, meaning multiple distinct networks with bridging and firewalls.

As I also wanted IPV6 connectivity for my home network and would rather have a single provider for both, I started looking at the current state of tunnel brokers to end up choosing Hurricane Electric who offer free IPV6 tunnels and one /48 network per subnet which is exactly what I needed. They have Point of Presence pretty much all around the world which means very low latency IPV6 for all my networks.
They also happen to be one of the two upstream providers of the ISP we use at the office.

So I started configuring my Vyatta (Debian-based router distribution) routers to handle the IPV6 tunnel, send Router Advertisement to all my networks (radvd), relay DHCPv6 to my DHCP server and firewall incoming traffic.
That was surprisingly easy, taking only a few minutes, copy/pasting the configuration provided by the tunnel broker and setting up the firewall rules.

I then made sure all my main services are working properly with IPV6, for now that includes, DNS servers, Web servers, Mail servers and shell access. Backported Natty’s isc-dhcp-server to 10.04 LTS and moved my DHCP to using it and created a minimal configuration to get stateless DHCPv6 to announce my NTP and DNS servers.
I also updated my public DNS to include AAAA records for all services that have dual-stack support and got my registar to add IPV6 glue records to my domain.

I’ve now been running that setup for a week or so for my home network, dedicated server and office network. Running wireshark for a few hours showed that almost half of my connections are IPV6 (mostly on my own networks).

I’ve been surprised to see how well Ubuntu Natty’s NetworkManager copes with IPV6 network. In my case, it successfully noticed the “other-config” flag in the router advertisement and started dhclient to grab the DNS and NTP configuration from the DHCPv6 server.

So I now have a working environment to developer the next generation LTSP-Cluster which is supposed to have complete IPV6 support from the first release.

Let’s hope we’ll see more IPV6 deployment in 2011.
Happy new year everyone !

Posted in LTSP, LXC, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment

Want your own Edubuntu weblive ?

Since I announced Edubuntu WebLive 8000 users have been testing Edubuntu using it.

Edubuntu WebLive

After a bit of cleaning up and packaging, I’m now pleased to announce that the source code for both our Drupal plugin and the XML-RPC daemon is available on Launchpad: https://code.launchpad.net/vmmanager.

Drupal plugin

Features:

  • Provider the user interface for Weblive, like the one on: http://www.edubuntu.org/vmmanager
  • Gives a basic administration interface to enable/disable the NX servers and update all the text shown in the user interface
  • Code is PHP using the Drupal form APIs and php-xmlrpc to contact the ltsp-cluster-agent plugin

Installation is relatively trivial, just follow the README file in the branch.

ltsp-cluster-agent plugin

Features:

  • XML-RPC service (authenticated and using HTTPS) that Drupal uses to create new users
  • Database of all accounts ever created, their status and expiry time
  • Support for multiple SSH servers
  • Client to query the database (also over xml-rpc) to gather statistics or manually create/remove accounts
  • Code is python, using paramiko for SSH and storm+sqlite as ORM

Installation is straightforward as everything is packaged here: https://launchpad.net/~stgraber/+archive/experimental

ltsp-cluster-agent is a python daemon designed for use by LTSP and LTSP-Cluster. More on that in a later post.

The VM itself

For Edubuntu, our VMs are entirely automatically generated using debian-installer preseeding and KVM.
Unfortunately these scripts are not clean enough yet for me to release them, I’d expect to have them out very soon though.

The basic requirement for the VM is to have these packages installed:

  • ltsp-cluster-accountmanager (used to cleanup session leftovers)
  • freenx-server (the NX server)

We have recent versions of both in Revolution Linux’s PPA. ltsp-cluster-accountmanager is also in the archive since karmic and I’m hoping for freenx-server to enter the archive soon.

I’d also recommend removing the following packages as they caused some issues with Edubuntu WebLive:

  • network-manager, network-manager-gnome, network-manager-pptp, network-manager-pptp-gnome
  • jockey-common, jockey-gtk
  • rtkit

As usual, comments, patches and bug reports are welcome. I’d also be happy to hear from other deployments of WebLive !

Posted in Edubuntu, LTSP, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Announcing LDM 2.2 and LTSP 5.2.5

Today, I’m pleased to announce the release of both LTSP 5.2.5 and LDM 2.2.

Quite a lot of changes went in over the past few months, 25 commits since the last ltsp release and 82 for ldm.
Here’s a quick overview of what’s new.

Big LDM refactoring and cleanup

Almost a year ago, my company got some funding from the NLNet foundation to work on a few LTSP and LTSP-Cluster related projects. One of them was to make LDM extensible, moving it to a plugin infrastructure and making it’s interface a bit more flexible.

I’m glad to announce that all of that work landed upstream almost two months ago and since then has been cleaned up and tested.
From a user experience point of view, the only noticeable change should be that the same login screen can now be used for Linux (ssh), Windows (rdp) login and for fat clients.

From a sysadmin/developer point of view, a lot changed:

  • Support for multiple backends. The old SSH backend as been ported to the plugin infrastructure and an RDP plugin has been written. A pam/libssh plugin should soon replace the current SSH plugin
  • Switched to using multiple windows and a window manager instead of our old fullscreen window. It should make it a lot easier to add more widgets to the login screen.
  • New logging functions with different logging levels and standardized logging output with syslog support

LDM 2.2

Remote apps support

It’s now been a few years since we have local applications supported in LTSP. It’s greatly improved over the years to get to what we currently have in LTSP.
The biggest issue of it was that if you start a software like firefox as a localapp and click on a .pdf/.odt/… document in it, it won’t be able to open them unless the required viewer is also a localapp.

That’s now been fixed thanks to the work done by Marc Gariépy and Gideon Romm during the last LTSP hackfest in Southwest Harbor, ME.
ltsp-remoteapps is a new command that can be assigned to mimetypes on the thin client and will open the viewer on the application server.

For the user, this means that if they click on a .odt document in their local firefox, it’ll now automatically open it in OpenOffice Writer on the application server.
Giving the desktop-like experience that was missing for local applications.

Other than these two big changes, we had our usual set of bug fixes, cleanup and translation updates.

Packages for Ubuntu Natty are already available and a backport for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) is available in my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~stgraber/+archive/ppa

Posted in LTSP, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | 3 Comments