Setting up a PDC on armhfp

Development
1

I am new here, using the Nethserver-arm 7.5 release on a Cubietruck armv7 SOC.

I currently have a ClearOS6 server as a PDC providing roaming profiles and user home shares for a few XP systems. I want use Nethserver similarly, but all the new systems SHOULD be Win7 (I hope I will be able to replace that one old notebook).

So I have installed the file service app. But it of course points me to needing a user/group provider. LDAP or AD. Well LDAP SHOULD work for just a PDC and roaming profiles. I looked (quickly) at the documentation and the howtos, and did not find guidance.

So if some one can lend a hand, even to point me to the proper, already published info, I would greatly appreciate it!

Plus whatever else I will need to install AFTER LDAP/AD…

Thanks

2

I never got to work with AD. If AD will work better for Win7 roaming profiles and such, then I suppose it is past time to bite the bullet.

I may be a real old timer (started on DOS 1.0), but I can still learn new tricks.

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3

For Windows clients, shares with permissions and for roaming profiles you need the AD account provider. Nethserver uses samba 4 which provides a DC instead of a PDC (older samba). Here is some info about the difference of PDC and DC.

http://docs.nethserver.org/en/v7/accounts.html#account-providers

Roaming profiles are not supported but there are some instructions:

If you installed the account provider, you are ready. No more additional modules needed as you already installed the file server module.

Win 7 clients should just work.

EDIT:

I don’t know it nethserver-dc works on this arm release, on the raspberry image it doesn’t.

4

The nerthserver-dc nodule is not available for armhfp. Reason is it is a special module which runs a vanilla samba instance in a (systemd) nspawn container.
I got it running in the past but needed to thinker a lot due to installation/configuration timeouts and reckoned the installation to be to unpredictable.

This was about 2 years ago and things may have changed so lets try it again. :grinning:
Would not get to high hopes though…

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5

ClearOS has always supported roaming profiles as a Samba 3 PDC. I will just have to figure out what they/I did and get it working with the LDAP provider for now.

Also this probably means I need less memory and I might be able to use one of my Cubieboard2 with 1GB memory instead of the Cubietruck with 2GB. For this purpose, this is their only difference; both have the A20 chip.

6

First thing to tackle is compile a vanilla (ns-)samba for armhfp.

ns-samba did compile but have trouble with packaging it. 

Processing files: ns-samba-4.7.10-1.ns7.armv7hl
error: File not found: /builddir/build/BUILDROOT/ns-samba-4.7.10-1.ns7.arm/usr/share/man/man5/pam_winbind.conf.5

line in generated file-list (ns-samba-4.7.10.filelist)
/usr/share/man/man5/pam_winbind.conf.5

in reality:

<mock-chroot> sh-4.2# ls /builddir/build/BUILDROOT/ns-samba-4.7.10-1.ns7.arm/usr/share/man/man5/pam_winbind.conf.5*
/builddir/build/BUILDROOT/ns-samba-4.7.10-1.ns7.arm/usr/share/man/man5/pam_winbind.conf.5.gz

Note gz : pam_winbind.conf.5.gz

@davidep do you have suggestions / directions / ideas what is happening?

My bad: used the wrong mock cfg.

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7

I hit this kind of error on slow machines with a poor random numbers source. The certificate generation task was freezing the whole process until it timed out.

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8

First see my howto on better random number entropy, but I suspect this is not the problem here.

Perhaps can we change from RSA to at least ECDSA? Generation of equiv straight is faster. Plus use is faster. And EDDSA is finally in openSSL 1.1.1

See my Internet Drafts on using the command line openSSL to build PKIs with these algorithms so you can test out using them. I did this because at the IETF hackathon, people were saying they could not test with certs because it was too hard to go to a commercial PKI to get what they needed just for testing…

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9

Lovely elliptic curve: we had a close encounter with it last spring! But here (with NSDC) the certificate is (still) generated by Samba startup scripts.

We have plans to integrate it with the host system certificate though: SSL certificates for Samba AD (NSDC host). It would remove the task of generating it for NSDC.

10

meanwhile (on second run) nethserver-dc did install on a RPI3+ with a really decent SD card.

One reoccurring error during install/configuration/provisioning (line 1501):

lets see if it works and how it behaves :grinning:

11

A lot of my colleagues in the IETF do not agree. I know some of the history behind ECDSA. Very interesting indeed! On a sabbatical to Canada? Test values that become production?

Some feel that the timing attacks can be managed and that EDDSA was rushed. I don’t like how they used SHA512 instead of SHAKE128 or SHAKE256 if they really had to. This impacts really small systems.

But you can see that openSSH already supports both ECDSA and EDDSA.

I might be able to lend a hand on the cert stuff, though I am rusty on some aspects.

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12

You can ignore it. It’s not a real issue: sssd: tkey query failed (dyndns_update) · Issue #5383 · NethServer/dev · GitHub

We tried to set up ECC certificates support, but we’re not experts on the field: any help is welcome!

13

The nethserver-dc package (and group) is in the arm 7.5.1804 repository

NOTE: it’s development and I have it installed just once, good chance it will fail and wreck your arm installation

To see if installation is going well i recommend to follow the progress on a (ssh)terminal with journalctl -f

As it stands now the most critical part is likely the time the installer waits for the nscd container to boot and serve SRV records. On x86_64 it waits for max 5 minutes and it’s prolonged to 10 min for armhfp. (on my RPI3+ it took 1min 40sec.)

Installation and preparation is as usual:
http://docs.nethserver.org/en/latest/accounts.html#samba-active-directory-local-provider-installation

EDIT:
Do not forget to grow your rootfs before installing the local AD, the nsdc container of aprox 580MB does not fit on the rootfs partition of the currently shipped image. (see README in /root)

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14

I started the install of the DC. It wanted me to specify a different address than what the system was running on. So I supplied 192.168.129.7 (currently on .14). Seems it is going to use a /24 subnet which will work for starters.

So it gets 62% done with the message adjust-services and hangs.

the last few messages from journalctl -f is:

Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com systemd[1]: Started DNS caching server…
Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com systemd[1]: Starting DNS caching server…
Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com dnsmasq[10475]: started, version 2.76 cachesize 4000
Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com dnsmasq[10475]: compile time options: IPv6 GNU-getopt DBus no-i18n IDN DHCP DHCPv6 no-Lua TFTP no-conntrack ipset auth no-DNSSEC loop-detect inotify
Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com dnsmasq-tftp[10475]: TFTP root is /var/lib/tftpboot
Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com dnsmasq[10475]: using nameserver 50.253.254.2#53
Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com dnsmasq[10475]: read /etc/hosts - 2 addresses
Oct 09 18:47:10 klovia.htt-consult.com esmith::event[8963]: Action: /etc/e-smith/events/actions/adjust-services SUCCESS [3.58274]

So I check IP:

ip a

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
inet6 ::1/128 scope host
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master br0 state UP group default qlen 1000
link/ether 02:c1:08:81:e2:d7 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet6 fe80::c1:8ff:fe81:e2d7/64 scope link
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

hmm, no IP address. So

cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
BRIDGE=br0
NM_CONTROLLED=no
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no

no wonder no IP address.

Since this is with the arm build, do you want to move this trouble shooting over to the arm testing thread(s)?

15

Looks like I was a bit premature on giving up and going away…

ifcfg-eth0 still the same, but I see:

cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-br0
DEVICE=br0
BOOTPROTO=none
GATEWAY=
IPADDR=192.168.192.14
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NM_CONTROLLED=no
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Bridge
USERCTL=no

And the install ended with errors:

 Task completed with errors

S96nethserver-dc-createldapservice #15 (exit status 256)
S95nethserver-dc-waitstart #23 (exit status 256)
S96nethserver-dc-createldapservice #24 (exit status 256)
S96nethserver-dc-join #25 (exit status 256)
S97nethserver-dc-password-policy #26 (exit status 256)
S98nethserver-dc-createadmins #28 (exit status 256)
Adjust service sssd #157 (exit status 1)
    failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/ntp.conf #131 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/ntp.conf failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/hosts #132 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/hosts failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/resolv.conf #133 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/resolv.conf failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/hostname #134 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/hostname failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/system/nsdc-run@.service #135 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/system/nsdc-run@.service failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/system/samba-provision.service #136 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/system/samba-provision.service failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/system/nsdc-run.socket #137 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/system/nsdc-run.socket failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/network/green.network #138 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/systemd/network/green.network failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/samba/smb.conf.include #139 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/etc/samba/smb.conf.include failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/srv/smb.ns6upgrade.conf #140 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/srv/smb.ns6upgrade.conf failed
Template /var/lib/machines/nsdc/srv/post-provision.sh #141 (exit status 1)
    expansion of /var/lib/machines/nsdc/srv/post-provision.sh failed

for DNS name I used: homebase.htt-consult.com

for netbios name: HOMEBASE

and as I previously said the DC IP addr is 192.168.192.7

It is not too much of an issue to rebuild the image from scratch and start again tomorrow…

BTW, as I think of it, I would like the DNS name to be home.htt; something that is not usable at all externally. This is what I did with my ClearOS setup; I hope it will work here.

16

I read Using Different Internal and External Domain Names: Domain Name System(DNS) | Microsoft Learn

I don’t see this as a concern for my small home network. I am assuming that the server itself can keep its name in the htt-consult.com internal view.

17

I took the liberty to change the subject, if you wish you can change back. :grinning:

Looks like the installation of (the packages of) the container failed.

Key to indicate success of this part of the installation is line 1266 in my log:

Oct 09 16:54:44 rpi3p.havak.lan esmith::event[1567]: Complete!
Oct 09 16:54:44 rpi3p.havak.lan esmith::event[1567]: Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/machines.target to /usr/lib/systemd/system/machines.target.
Oct 09 16:54:44 rpi3p.havak.lan systemd[1]: Reloading.

Sorry to ask:
Did you grow your rootfs before installing the AD. I think i should have mentioned it won’t fit on the partition of the currently shipped image. see README in /root to grow the rootfs.

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18

This is good.

#df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        953M     0  953M   0% /dev
tmpfs          1007M     0 1007M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs          1007M   25M  982M   3% /run
tmpfs          1007M     0 1007M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda3       155G  1.2G  152G   1% /
/dev/sda1       642M  164M  459M  27% /boot
tmpfs           202M     0  202M   0% /run/user/0

I think I made it big enough for a lot of user data…

Now in order, I first installed file server (which auto installed firewall) THEN I ‘went back’ to install user/group provider.

Perhaps that has an impact?

19

yes 152G should do it… (understatement of year :wink:)

Sorry I do not know. It may sould a bit strange: Having the nethserver-dc package dismissed for arm in the past, I am not very familiar with it.

Maybe others can chip in how to debug this.

Just can share my work flow:

  1. configure network: set green interface to fixed IP (and make a record for it in the my local DNS server)
  2. update
  3. grow rootfs partition
  4. reboot
  5. install account provider
  6. then install other modules, usually one at a time

to be accurate: between 1 and 2 provide a selfsigned-certificate trusted my local environment. This because firefox goes crazy if you have multiple exceptions for the same ip/hostname (which happens if you reinstall the same SBC over and over again)

A habit of me while testing/debugging is to reboot before installing the “test subject” and write hole journalctl of the event to a file. ( journalctl > my_event.log ).
There may be more sophisticated methods, it works for me…

BTW a log of the hole event should be logged in /var/log/messages which can also be viewed in the web-ui at Administration > Log viewer > /var/log/messages

20

Success!

I started from scratch with the base image. I expanded the rootfs partition while the drive was still connected to my notebook using gparted. I am lazy that way. Plus I like to look at what whatever arm image is doing partition-wise.

  1. changed the root password
  2. set the timezone to America/Detroit using timedatectl
  3. Install zram

Connected to port 980 and went through the setup.

This time it did not ask me to change the root password, as I changed it from the serial console earlier.

It prompted me for the timezone, offering that current was DETROIT; I wonder what would have happened if the tz file has a city name in two regions? :slight_smile: We had a discussion about setting time zones in both the Fedora user and Xfce lists. Gnome has moved past using the tz file, giving much better geo choices…

Then I was on the interface dialog and it recommended I change from a DHCP address. So this time I did. This is the important difference than before, where I kept the system on the dhcp address.

Note that when I changed the IP address, I lost my connection. I have been on devices where when I changed address, I was issued a redirect to the new address before the interface was bounced. Not the case here. You should have a warning here about reconnecting to the new address.

I then went to the install AD dialog. Set up domain dns as home.htt and Netbios as HOMEBASE and IP as on the same network as the static. This time the install worked.

So please update the install instructions page:

http://docs.nethserver.org/en/latest/accounts.html#samba-active-directory-local-provider-installation

to say the importance of changing to a static address if you expect the provider installation to work.

Oh, and I see on the Dashboard, that you are now picking up that I am running on a Cubietruck.

Onward!