Waldemar Schlackow

We have recently done our small part in caring about our planet and deployed a cross-platform green IT infrastructure across our network (~450 desktops). Basically this means that machines are off out of working hours, if nobody is using them (which ends up being around 60% of all desktops). Should somebody need a machine when it is off, then it can be woken up remotely. This sounds like a simple task, but is actually trickier than one might first think. Especially when it comes to cross-platform solutions for determining if somebody is using the machine or managing wake-on-lan.

After I got finally fed up with Windows, I uninstalled it on the last machine in our home, which happened to be the Mediacenter. Unfortunately this also meant getting rid of Mediaportal. Whilst I think that Mediaportal is great software, it's written for an OS which is outdated, inflexible and oftentimes unstable [especially when it comes to dodgy hardware drivers!].

Whilst working in the Mathematical Department over the last few years, it seems that remote access to departmental services has become very important. The usual approach which companies take for remote access is VPN, but it is not trivial to setup for a user at home, especially if we want to support most operating systems. Also there are certain conditions on the client-side network for VPN to work, and one certainly shouldn't run two VPN connections at a time.

sergem1 has created a wonderful plugin for Russian TV On Demand from ETVNet for Mediaportal. Unfortunately it didn't work for me on Vista with Mediaportal 1.0.2 . So I have made a few minor code modifications to make it work (and also added some improvements). The following things were added/fixed:

After we started using Unattended which I have mentioned in the first post on this, it has developed very well. New software/drivers are easily added and it's working very well overall. There has been one annoying flaw, however. It was not possible to deploy software to already deployed workstations without visiting the workstation or logging in through VNC and interacting with the desktop. It looks like I managed to overcome this issue.

UPDATE: It looks like FDS has been properly packaged for Ubuntu 8.10, so I would suggest you look at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FedoraDirectoryServer

rather than using the packages mentioned here.

I have created some FDS 1.1.1 packages, which are currently only available for Ubuntu Hardy (they might work on other debian based distros, which have the same libc version). These are not actually built packages, but rather rebuilt RPMs from Fedora Core 8 (with path adjustments etc). I will be looking into building from scratch at some point. For the time being it needed to go quickly. Certainly there are no guarantees that it will work and I am looking forward to some comments.

In my previous post I was talking about Windows deployment, which required quite a lot of hackery by the people at http://unattended.sf.net to make it work with standard tools. For Linux, as usual, this is all provided by the vendors. We use the preseeded Debian installer which we netboot to get a standard Ubuntu desktop installed and then we use puppet to make customisations.

There are many ways of deploying Windows nowadays. Most common ones are probably unattended CD installations and RIS/WDS deployments. However, the guys at http://unattended.sf.net came up with an ingenious idea of deploying Windows through a PXE/netboot Linux.

I have recently installed Jabber with several transports, so that I can be online in ICQ/AIM simultaneously from several machines. I tried to do it in Ubuntu Feisty, but that wasn't as easy as I would have hoped.