LUM users dropping group?

We've been running OpenSUSE 11 with LUM for about a month now, and we're running into an issue with users randomly loosing their primary group.

You type the following:
'id user'
returns:
uid=1044(user) gid=601(Domain Users)
It SHUOLD be returning
uid=1044(user) gid=601(Domain Users) groups=601(Domain Users)

I thought at first there might be a Identity Manager issue, where Windows is causing the user to loose group information. So I disabled synchronization, but alas -- no luck. While the error seems to be happening less now, its still happening.

The only way to fix the issue I've found so far is to do the following:
open up iManager
modify the user
delete the group they belong to which is a 'primary group'
add the group they should have as a primary group
and it shows up again

Live from OSCON!

So all this week, I'll try to update folks on how things are moving the LTSP and Drupal world.

First things first though. setting up the makeshift lab in the hotel room. CHECK.

If you wanna see our test webcam? Its up!


it reloads every 4 seconds. I need to get longer ethernet cables so I can put it in a better spot.

Live from OSCON!

So all this week, I'll try to update folks on how things are moving the LTSP and Drupal world.

First things first though. setting up the makeshift lab in the hotel room. CHECK.

If you wanna see our test webcam, go here: http://mail.asemblon.com/webcam/oscon.html
it reloads every 4 seconds. I need to get longer ethernet cables so I can put it in a better spot.

OSCON 2008

its 3:25am, ugh and I'm still up. Went to see Batman tonight. GREAT, err EPIC movie!

So far OSCON is looking like this:
Leave tomorrow, Friday the 18th -- going to talk with the postgreSQL group at their meeting on sunday. Perhaps goto the beach Saturday.
Monday, Tuesday working on drupal stuff -- possibly some LTSP, depends on who will be there.
Wednesday I'm going to try to meet up with Greg KH, either on the expo hall or at the Opensuse meeting at 4:30PM.
Thursday night is FOSCON, and Josh + Me are supposed to be competing in a rapid web development thingy. It should be fun to show off Drupal!
Friday starts the LTSP conference, going into saturday. I'll be around hopefully most of friday, and try to be there saturday morning-midday, before heading back home saturday evening.

If you want to stalk me, here is my (tentative) schedule:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/share/8150fc1b3e34c209fe837a3e0d3fd926

At the linuxfest northwest booth, we will have our production/test LTSP server, running OpenSUSE 11.0 and the Novell client. If I can get the VPN running correctly, I hope to show it off connecting upto eDirectory.

My main goals at OSCON this year is to..
1) talk to some novell/opensuse devs and get an idea where Novell is on supporting multi-user systems such as LTSP
2) Kick ass and take names with drupal development
3) Find neat new tools we can implement within our technology structure
4) Try to squash a few annoying usability problems with our current LTSP system.
5) Find at least one person who uses tinyERP. (Good luck with that!)

If you're looking for me, I'll be wearing a computer t-shirt. oh and have a name tag on. umm I guess that describes 90% of us. I usually lurk around the linuxfest booth.. hmm that probably doesn't help much either. Okay well I look like this... I'm the young one, bottom right:

Novell Client 2.0 after a few days... =(

After my previous post about running Novell Client on SuSe, we upgraded all of our SLED10 users to OpenSUSE with success at first. However this morning someone called me up and said:

"Hey Jakob, Public isn't showing up"

Uh oh. We saw this the second day after implementation, but the user just had the public icon behind another icon. This time I was not so lucky. My first hunch was novfs. Oh man, good guess:

drwxrwxrwx 1 root      root   0 Jul  9 19:10 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root      root 144 May  8  2007 ..
drwxrwxrwx 1 root      root   0 Jul  9 19:10 .Servers
drwxrwxrwx 1 root      root   0 Jul  9 19:10 .Trees
drwxr-xr-x 1 admin     root   0 Jul 15 09:33 admin
drwxr-xr-x 1 ctimmon   root   0 Jul 15 09:28 ctimmon
d????????? ? ?         ?      ?            ? dhson
drwxr-xr-x 1 root      root   0 Jul 14 18:54 djanss
drwxr-xr-x 1 eesrez    root   0 Jul 15 07:43 eesrez
d????????? ? ?         ?      ?            ? esagh
drwxr-xr-x 1 gblte     root   0 Jul 15 09:28 gblte
drwxr-xr-x 1 gdvis     root   0 Jul 14 16:57 gdvis
drwxr-xr-x 1 mbokl     root   0 Jul 15 07:27 mbokl
d????????? ? ?         ?      ?            ? mdrak
drwxr-xr-x 1 mnaemi    root   0 Jul 15 08:16 mnaemi
drwxr-xr-x 1 tbkr      root   0 Jul 15 08:00 tbkr

Wtf? ??? ? ? ?? ? ? there are Q's all over the place, meaning I believe that whatever links user/permissions to the folder has gone away. Digging back to my C experience (which is little and lasted all of one semester at PLU) I figured there is probably a buffer overflow or some max setting that's being hit. When we had our 5 test users, we ran this for 2 weeks without a problem. We put on 19 users, and once we hit that magical number, we start getting very odd problems.

So the quick fix is to only have 15-18 users logged in per machine. For our company, thats okay... for now. But this is a major bug. Who knows what security problems exist within this module.

I opened up a bug on Novell's website: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=409308

My thinking now is that novfs really should become a FUSE module, which could work with the novell client to restore network maps. I'm hoping someone from novell sees these blog posts and helps out.

Am I the only one who runs multiple users per machine?

Novell Client 2.0 works in OpenSUSE11!

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who uses the novell client to log multiple users in on one machine, but bug reports sure don't show a whole lot of progress.

However! today, I think I have a patch that will fix the NWdrivebase issue seen here:
http://www.fcdnet.org/japerry/2008/05/novfs-ownership-woes.html

Basically there is some problem with random users getting assigned to the root directory that mounts servers for the novell client. Since I couldn't find where the user failure was, I decided it'd be good enough to change permissions. The sub folder isn't affected, so security is retained.

Patch here: http://fcdnet.org/japerry/novfs-permissions.patch

To apply this patch, go into fs/novfs in the kernel-source. You'll have to rebuild the kernel (but don't have to make install it) but just copy /proc/config.gz into your src directory, unzip and rename it .config. Make sure the .config includes NOVFS=m. Apply the novfs patch included here, type in make, and wait for a bit. When finished copy the novfs.ko into /lib/modules/KERNELNAME/kernel/fs/novfs/ -- if you want, backup the current novfs.ko file in the folder.
This should change the permissions from 0700 to 0777, which will allow the user to delete the directory upon logout. You'll notice that once inside /var/opt/novell/nclmnt/USERNAME that the Servers are all 0700 owned by the correct user.

Drupal 6 + Ubercart sandbox

So coming off the heels of the last post, I'm still working on ubercart. Blah. Many people use ubercart, and drupal 6 support is badly needed.

After an extensive talk with gordonh, and a few others, I've decided to nix ubercart 6.x development. I won't be doing any more development on D6, so no 1.0 release.

If you want to get involved with D6 ecommerce module, I'd highly suggest focusing your efforts there: http://groups.drupal.org/ecommerce !

That said, I've done quite a bit of work on the matter, and decided to post my sandbox here. Before you download, some caveats:
1) This is pre-alpha code -- ubercart v6 is only partially done and needs more development work done to it
2) it'd be better if I submitted a bunch of patches, but someone wanted a working system quickly--this is the fastest way to get up to speed.
3) this is RC4 code. I'm working to do a bzr update to 1.0, I'll update the tar.gz file as soon as thats finished.
4) This module comes with coder, devel, ubercart, rules, workflow_ng, ubrowser, tapir all with d6 .info and .install files and partial module support.

Download Here

Instructions:
Download, and extract to a directory accessible by your webserver. I use MAMP, which creates a nice little webserver/db for my mac.
Import the drupal6.sql file into mysql (mysql only right now, not postgres!)
Change settings.php to reflect the relevant paths for your installation.
My sandbox was just drupal6 (eg: http://drupal6/)
Bring up firefox and see if the site comes up. change files location to something relevant to your file system.

And that should be it! Email me or find me in irc.freenode.net: #drupal-ubercart, #drupal-dev, etc

Open Source Development and how NOT to do it

I'll admit: I'm part of the problem. I develop for ubercart, which is a fork of ecommerce. More about this later. But onto the soap-opera-drama in IRC this morning.

This has to do with yet another module that rszrama has decided to make on his own PM_lite, without any research of the APIs regarding privatemsg. Lets read the conversation....

IRC convo via pastebin: http://pastebin.com/f3f951a57

So thats the recent drama. I'm not sure if the coding wombat's team have college certs or not (not saying that programmers need to have degrees per-se, but it helps) but thier complete lack of research, critical thinking, willingness to work with others (rather than having others work for him), all on top of a lack of basic software design ideas, and on top of that -- the fact that they think they're right and anything said to them is in-one-ear and out the other, is just sad.

Now that said, I joined onto the ubercart team because last summer it appeared that drupal-ecommerce was dead. Hindsight is 20/20, but I needed an ecommerce package that worked and ubercart had the UI to get it done. That said, now I'm thinking that my involvement with ubercart should cease, and I should help the ecommerce platform become functially equivilent to ubercart. I haven't looked at ec for a while, but some folks have said they've fixed a bunch of fundamental interoperability problems and made some good api changes in the upcoming v4 release.

My eventual hope would be to see ubercart and ecommerce merge as one ecommerce package, and if they want to brand ubercart as a supported distro of ecommerce, great. They can share common payment, shipping, product, etc apis and add their own custom modules on top of that. This would bring harmony to ecommerce in drupal.

But for now, ubercart is where I'm at. For such a disfunctional group, the package seems to work fairly well. I'd like to see some good developers join on this effort, but as long as these 'wombats' are in command, it'll never happen; and for good cause.

novfs ownership woes - NwSetDriveBase2:8804

Something that has really been bugging me is a pest error called NwSetDriveBase2:8804
This error has showed up since SLED10 and persists into SLED10SP1, OpenSUSE 10.3, and OpenSuSE 11 Beta3.

Someone has posted another related issue with this error, but it seems to be unrelated to what I'm facing.
http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/open-enterprise-server/oes-platform-independent/oes-client-linux/143685-nwsetdrivebase2-error-mapping-drives.html

I've found two causes to this error. One is an easy fix, the other is the more annoying one...
1) Invalid/Dead symlinks to /var/opt/novell/nclmnt -- when ncl tries to map the drives it sees the file already exists and throws this error. Novell issued a KB on this:
http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=3810237&sliceId=1

2) Bad ownership on /var/opt/novell/nclmnt -- Example 'ls -la'
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 7 17:51 .Servers
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 7 17:51 .Trees
drwx------ 1 adfdgel root 0 May 21 07:27 adfdgel
drwx------ 1 fdfdard root 0 May 21 09:05 fdfdard
drwx------ 1 dhgfdon root 0 May 21 10:14 dhgfdon
drwx------ 1 nobody root 0 May 12 18:16 ghdfsen
drwx------ 1 root root 0 May 16 08:26 rsiueon
drwx------ 1 nobody root 0 May 19 18:16 tqkher
**usernames mangled for security**

You'll see above that the first 3 users are working correctly. They have ownership of their directories and are logged in. Users 4 and 6 are not logged in, so their folders are owned by nobody. Thats fine. The problem is with user number 5. rsiueon IS logged in, but his directory is owned by root, therefore he cannot map his drives. However, it seems that if this user goes into the .Servers directory, he can see all the shares just fine.

The only way to fix this is by rebooting. We've tried to log the user on and off multiple times, with no success. I'm not sure whats causing this to happen randomly, but its by far our biggest day-to-day issue with the novell client.