Automatic testing of PAM modules
Last week at the SambaXP conference I had a discussion with Günther Deschner about the testing of PAM modules. What we want to do is automatic testing. To achieve this in the Samba build farm you need a separate "pam.d" config directory for testing. You should be able to change the config and mess it up without getting locked out.
I've introduced a new function to PAM called pam_start_test() which takes and additional argument where you can specify the config directory. After this I've changed the call in pamtester and added a commandline option for the config directory. To do automatic testing I've added another commandline option to specify the password to use for authentication.
gladiac@maximegalon:~> pamtester -v -C/tmp/pam.d -Psecret login csync authenticate
pamtester: invoking pam_start(login, csync, ...)
pamtester: performing operation - authenticate
pamtester: successfully authenticated
You can find the patches here.
Roaming Home Directories for Linux
An interesting feature of Active Directory is Roaming Profiles. You can login on different workstations and you have all you data with you. If you use a Notebook you have the same and the ability to work offline. As soon as you're connected to you network again the data will be automatically synchronized again and you have a backup of your data.
Now the time has come to introduce Roaming Home Directories for Linux. Yesterday I've released a new version of csync and the first version of pam_csync. With both components you're able to use an Active Directory environment to share your data between workstation and notebooks and work offline.
Currently only the SMB protocol is supported but I will write more plugins for other protocols in future. I have sftp and rsync (if doable) in mind. So you will be able to use it at home with you're small NAS or in a Linux only company environment.
This is not the only use case. If you have a USB disk with your music collection. You can can attach it to PC1 and synchronize it with your local collection. Go to the next computer and synchronize it there again. As csync is a bidirectional file synchronizer the collection on PC1 and PC2 will be the same.
csync 0.42.0 alpha1
I've released the first alpha version of csync. csync is a client only bidirectional file synchronizer. You can use csync for different things. The intention is to provide Roaming Home Directories for Linux but you can use it to synchronize your music collection or create a backup of a directory. This is *not* intended for production environments and is designed for testing purposes only. This version is fully functional and you can sync two local directories or a local directory with a samba share.
More at http://www.csync.org/