Getting to the gym consistently is one of the biggest hurdles that I have stuck to jumping over while I'm trying to lose a bit more than a few. I seem to have no consistent schedule, except that I do end up doing it every day that I can. One downside of this is that I tend to work out late at night, almost always an hour or less before I go to bed. I've heard that this is not the best for the sleep, but I suspect it is actually better than nothing, so I continue to get to the gym at 11pm or 12pm. Unfortunately, I found myself with some extra roadblocks this week: the exercise room was half broken. The breakers on one half of the room tend to trip when the air conditioner and two machines that are on that circuit are all in use. This means that no one can use those machines until someone from the coop management goes and resets the switch. The treadmill machine, my weapon of choice for shedding a few pounds, is inconveniently on this circuit, and can't be plugged in anywhere else. This happened 3 times this week, Wed-Fri. I'm calling the office for the second time tomorrow.

It is significantly harder to exercise when I don't have the treadmill handy — the stepping machine works on semi-powered days, but it tires me out much too quickly and I cannot get enough exercise in. I'm not the kind of person to reliably run in place or do jumping jacks. My solution was to move the exercise bike to the powered side of the room. The biggest problem with semi-powered days is motivation. Usually I have the motivation to get to the exercise room and start the machine, and once I've started I can stop. Opening the door to a bunch of non-working machines is a huge motivation hit though. It's so much easier to take a roadblock like this and skip a day — in fact I did this week once. Luckily I discovered that the bike is on wheels on one side so it is easy to move to the other side of the room. However, I'd like to solicit suggestions for alternate exercises for semi-power days. The things that work in the room are a weight machine with a bunch of attachments, the stepping machine, and the exercise bike. I can't really go outside and exercise, because of the late hour and neighborhood that I live in, so it needs to be an inside task. The last requirement is that it focuses on losing weight, not gaining muscle. I'm fairly sure that I'll be gaining some muscle along this process, but the goal is to drop the weight.

I have taken Saturdays to be my day off, so that I can get a little rest and not be so stressed about things, but I'm not taking it this week as I need to "make up" for the skipped day.

This week (Nov 3 - Nov 9):
Minimum: 338.0 (-0.5) (Nov 7)
Maximum: 340.0 (-1.0) (Nov 4)
Average: 339.25 (-0.35) (139.25 to goal)
Exercise Calories: 2314 on 5 days
Average Calories per session: 462.8

I m still at the school in Ghana, and although I have quit, there are another five weeks to make use of. Linux is installed on quite a few machines, but it is not used very often, partly because the studentds don t know about it. I was instructed to boot to Windows by default, so they don t stumble over it either. To raise a more interest, I announced a Linux Gaming Tournament, and put up some posters. The participating students will compete in Frozen Bubble, the game formally known as Tuxracer and Tetrinet.As it turned out I got the permission to do so based on a misunderstanding: The principal thought I would create a game that itself would teach students to use Linux (maybe some kind of rally with hidden hints in various applications and folders, and whoever finds them wins). My original plan would not have been allowed, as there is a officially strict school policy against computer games, and because it is a boarding school, it is also a life policy for the students for four years.Because the tournament was already announced and students signed up for it, I will still be able to hold it, as an explicit exception to the rule. But what the administration would like to see, also to keep the interest in Linux up even after I will have removed the games again, is a longer lasting competition in a game with a more educational purpose. An old Mac game was named where the player has to run a business and in the process learns about spreadsheets.So, dear lazyweb, do you know of a game that

• runs on Linux. (i.e. no web based game)
• takes a while to complete. (i.e. several hours during the course of one or two weeks)
• has an educational purpose. (e.g. a economical simulation, maybe a simulation of evolution)
• maybe even is realtime in the sense that certain events happen after a certain amount of real world day, not just gaming hours.
• maybe even interacts with other people playing the game, over the network.

I know that the last two wishes would point to a web based game, but that defies the purpose to lure the people to start Linux.

One issue that is rarely considered is how to deal with office break-ins for the purpose of espionage. I believe that this issue has been solved reasonably well for military systems, but many of the military solutions do not apply well to civilian systems - particularly the use of scary dudes with guns. Also most office environments don't have the budget for any serious security, so we want to improve things a bit without extra cost. Finally the police aren't interested in crimes where an office is burgled for small amounts of cash and items of minor value, it gets lost in the noise of junky burglaries, so prevention is the only option.

Having heard more information about such break-ins than I can report, I'll note a few things that can be done to improve the situation - some of which I've implemented in production.

The most obvious threat model is theft of hard drives. The solution to this is to encrypt all data on the drives. The first level of this is to simply encrypt the partitions used for data, support for this is available in Fedora Core 6 and has been in Debian for some time. The more difficult feature is encrypting the root filesystem, encrypting root means that important system files such as /etc/shadow are encrypted. Also if the root filesystem is encrypted then an attacker can't trivially subvert the system by replacing binaries. An unencrypted root filesystem on a machine that is left turned off overnight (or for which an unexpected reboot won't be treated seriously) allows an attacker to remove the drive, replace important system files and then re-install it. If the machine is booted from removable media (EG USB key) which contains the kernel and the key for decrypting the root filesystem then such attacks are not possible. Debian/unstable supports an encrypted root filesystem, but last time I tried the installer there did not appear to be any good support for booting from USB (but given the flexibility of the installer I think it's within the range of the available configuration options). I have run Fedora systems with an encrypted root filesystem for a few years, but I had to do some gross hacks that were not of a quality that would be accepted. With the recent addition of support for encrypted filesystems in Fedora it seems likely that some such patches could be accepted - I would be happy to share my work with anyone who wants to do the extra work to make it acceptable for Fedora.

Once the data is encrypted on disk the next thing you want to do is to make the machines as secure as possible. This means keeping up to date with security patches even on internal networks. I think that a viable attack method is to install a small VIA based system in the switch cabinet (no-one looks for new equipment appearing without explanation) that sniffs an internal (and therefore trusted) network and proxies it to a public network. This isn't just an issue of securing applications, it also means avoiding insecure protocols such as NFS and AoE for data that is important for your secrecy or system integrity.

An option for using NFS is to encrypt it with IPSEC or similar technology. AoE can be encrypted with cryptsetup in the same way as you encrypt hard drive partitions, it doesn't use IP so IPSEC won't work but it is a regular block device so anything that encrypts block devices will work. I have been wondering about how well replay attacks might work on an encrypted AoE or iSCSI device.

Security technologies such as SE Linux are good to have as well. An attacker who knows that a server has encrypted hard drives might try cracking it instead. A thief who has stolen a laptop and knows that it has an encrypted drive can keep it running until future vulnerabilities are discovered in any daemons that accept data from the network (of course if you have enough technology you could sniff the necessary data from the system bus and from RAM while it's running - but most attackers won't have such resources). I have considered running a program on my laptop that would shut it down if for a period of 48 hours I didn't login or un-blank the screen, that would mean that if it was stolen then the thief would have 48 hours to try and crack it.

Prevent access to some hardware that you don't need. If you allow the system to load all USB drivers then maybe a bug in such a driver could be exploited to crack it. Remember that in a default configuration USB drivers will be loaded when a device is inserted (which is under control of an attacker) and the device will use data from the attacker's hardware (data of low integrity being accessed by code that has ultimate privilege). Turning off all USB access is an option that I have implemented in the past. I have not figured out a convenient way of disabling all USB modules other than the few that I need, I have considered writing a shell script to delete the unwanted modules that I can run after upgrading my kernel package.

Once these things have been done the next issue is securing hardware. Devices to monitor keyboard presses have been used to steal passwords. The only solution I can imagine for this is to use laptops on people's desks and then store them in a safe overnight, unfortunately laptops are still quite a bit more expensive than desktop machines and consequently they are mostly used as status symbols in offices. Please let me know if you have a better idea for solving the key-logging problem.

For servers there is also a problem with keyboard sniffing. Maybe storing the server's keyboard in a safe would be a good idea.

Security monitoring systems are a good idea, unfortunately they can be extremely expensive. There has already been at least one recorded case of a webcam being used to catch a burglar. I believe that this has a lot of potential. Get a webcam server setup with some USB hubs and cameras and you can monitor a small office from all angles. When the office is empty you can have it GPG encrypt pictures and send them off-site for review in the case of burglary. You could also brick the server into a wall (or make it extremely physically secure in other ways) so that the full photo record would be available in the case of damaged phone lines, and to give more pictures than the upload bandwidth of an ADSL link would allow (512Kb/s doesn't allow uploading many pictures - no-where near the capacity of a few high-resolution web-cams).

This is just a few random thoughts, some things I've done, some things I plan to do, and some that just sound like fun. I expect comments telling me that I have missed some things. I may end up writing a series of articles on this topic.

PS I've uploaded day 32 of the beard (which was taken yesterday). Last night at a LUV meeting I was asked to stand in front of the audience to show them my beard. I had imagined that they might have seen it enough through my blog, but apparently not.

Today started with drafting a release update (did anybody tell so far how much time it costs to write such mails? - of course it is time well spent, but still lots of time). Two review rounds, and a couple of smaller issues made most of my morning. In the afternoon, I worked on my mail backlog, and answered e.g. a longish mail from an journalist about release management in Debian. Not something that directly improves the release, but I believe it is also time well spent - if we get our point of view distributed better. Amazingly again how much time one can spend with writing stuff.

I’ve been working on archive rebuilds lately (rebuilding all etch packages inside etch). It generates a lot of data to analyze (failed build logs), and the work could easily be split between several developers. For each package which fails to build, I add a line in a Gnumeric spreadsheet with the package name, the version I tried to build, the output of a script which tries to guess the reason for the failure using regexps, and the “resolution” (was a bug filed ? a new package not yet in testing ?) (example here) Instead of doing this locally in Gnumeric, I’d like to do that online, using wiki-like editing, so other people could investigate different failures concurrently. My ideal piece of software would:

• be efficient to use (something AJAX based would be great)
• allow for line-based locking, so people can just lock the line they are working on
• allow for CSV-export/import, so I could fetch the whole data, add new failures using a script, and import it back

Does this exist ?

I'm sitting in the keynote for the Web 2.0 Conference and realizing that it's been far too long since I made an entry on my blog. It's been a huge week for me since I last posted.

• We went trick-or-treating with my brother Andy, his wife Pam, and their daughters Elena and Tessa, all over their neighborhood in wt:Mountain View. Amita June dressed up like a pumpkin, and although she was initially shy, once she figured out there was candy involved, she really got into the t-or-t process.
• I wrote a Web 2.0 Conference preview article for LinuxWorld, talking about the intimate relationship between Open Source and Web 2.0 projects. I think it's pretty darn good, although Don thinks it should have more sexy references to cool Web 2.0 personalities. Well, I hope I'll get that for my daily coverage this week.
• We stayed with my brother Nate and his very nice girlfriend Kristen in their place right across from Laurel Village in wt:San Francisco. We had some great Chinese take-out from Eliza's in Pacific Heights. We stayed at their place through the weekend while they headed to Chicago for a Notre Dame football game.
• We visited our friends Natahne and Russell in wt:Petaluma on Friday night. Natahne is a friend of Maj's from waaaaaay back; she's since become a doula, and she helped Maj through some of her pre-natal time. They have a cute daughter, Iayanna, who's about 10 megatons of energy packed into a 5-year-old's body. We went to wt:Novato's Maya Palenque restaurant -- really tasty Yucatan-style Mexican food (plaintains, seafood) and family friendly service. Amita June got a balloon, which she loves like a mother loves her youngest child.
• We had brunch at All You Knead on the Haight on Saturday, then I drove for 3 hours down to wt:Big Sur to visit friends from Pigdog who were doing a campout over the weekend. It was totally great -- I met some very nice folks who I'd only seen on pictures on the Web, and then sat around with old friends around a campfire and told the same old bullshit stories we'd told each other for more than 10 years. Beautiful full moon over the ocean on my drive back up Highway 1... got home at 2AM, loved every minute.
• Brunch for my Mom's birthday at the Cabana in wt:Palo Alto. Lots of grandkids underfoot, family and champagne all around nice.
• We had dinner with Jack Herrick of wikiHow, his wife Tricia and their kids Brodie and Tess on Sunday night. Good kids, nice Thai takeout (hint for people with family friends: get used to takeout), nice to talk to people who know a lot about travelling and a lot about wiki.
• Spent the day with Jack at his office in SF yesterday afternoon, then over to wt:El Cerrito to have dinner with Zach and Wendy and Wyatt at Fat Apple's. Zach and Wendy are like the dream parent friends we wish we had at home -- it's nice to spend time with them.

Whew. OK, so, I think I'm caught up. There's probably a lot of stuff that I missed, but I don't feel like I have to fill in any more. The next 3 days at Web 2.0 are going to be busy, so I really want to be able to blog without guilt. tags: san francisco petaluma zach wendy jack herrick cabana brunch mom big sur pigdog

As a matter of principle, I try to avoid any conflict of interest between my release manager and alpha porter hats, by e.g. deferring to my co-RM when there's a question of whether a particular compromise should be made to benefit alpha's releasability. Where Dunc Tank is concerned, that means some changes in priorities for bugs to work on, since I'm being paid to try to get etch out in a timely manner, not to keep the alpha port afloat. OTOH, alpha is not the only arch that produces RC bugs needing release team attention, and Dunc Tank only dictates how I spend 40-50 hours of my week -- which means another 20-30 hours a week of Debian work that I can set my own priorities for, right? So the theme ingredient over the weekend was: problems on the alpha port.

• NMUed qdbm with a workaround for the long-standing build failure, helpfully filed by Aur lien G r me as bug #394626; this in theory makes it possible to get the fix for bug #367374 into testing by the normal route, but now hyperestraier and qdbm both have a very strange build failure on alpha and mips...
• It took quite a bit of time to track down RC bug #378346 in gail, what with all the libraries that needed to be rebuilt from experimental. Turns out to be a garbage collection issue fixed upstream. Who knows why this only showed up on alpha?
• I also poked a bit at the kernel for alpha, for the possibility of supporting installation on TITAN and TSUNAMI class systems. It looks promising to have this in for etch, which would be nice because these are higher-end alphas that could extend the lifetime of the alpha port overall if we can manage to turn that support into something like a new porter machine...
• Then I spent some more time poking at the kernel thanks to 397139, which showed that the fixes to get the kernel building under gcc-4.1 on alpha didn't quite do the trick.

I'll give myself 4/5 points for presentation, 5/5 points for use of the theme ingredient, and 6/10 points for taste (this plastic computer case needs more salt). And of course, waiting for Debian kernel packages to compile on an LX164 alpha gives one time to do other things too, like following through on the RC bugs that the BTS has wrong version-tracking information for, and preparing an NMU here and there. Less than 200 RC bugs left now, and dropping daily!

I was allowed to add an additional vhost to debian.netcologne.de to try out secure apt signature issues. There is now available deb http://testmirror.turmzimmer.net/debian sarge main - the only difference to the real host is an additional signature on http://testmirror.turmzimmer.net/debian/dists/sarge/Release.gpg. Please feel free to try out that host as mirror for your sarge-based systems, and report any breakages that happen. The second key I used is the volatile archive key (as that was easy available) - I'll switch one day to the real Stable Release Managers key.

In front of the City Hall, there is this piece of art. A bus driver who often drives me from work commented recently that the shirts are probably dry by now. Similar comments have been seen in the regional newspaper letters to the editor.

Having spent the better part of two days provisioning my new MacBook Pro’s OS X, Debian, and Windows XP instances, I am keenly aware of how much the Debian distribution’s package management system and its volume of packages have spoiled me. In that two days, the amount of time required to provision Debian was negligible, even though it is configured to completely match my Lifebook’s Debian Sid instance. In fact, the sum total of time to set up Debian, including every application I use, was about 45 minutes of my involvement. Those who know Debian (and Ubuntu, Linspire, Xandros, Mepis, or any other Debian derivative) are coolly nodding their heads, while others are probably thinking I am a lying, biased Linux zealot. It’s no lie; here are the steps I had to take:

• Run the Debian Installer business card image and perform a stock Sid installation, choosing Desktop and Standard System options in the task selection step. If you weren’t wanting to run Sid, the netinstall image would be fine as well.
• Generate a package list on the current Debian installation via # dpkg --get-selections > dpkg-selections.txt
• Copy the package list file to the new installation; I have copied it to my home directory in this example.
• Set the package selections for the new installation via # dpkg --set-selections ~/dpkg-selections.txt
• Run aptitude or synaptic and choose the install action, then go do something else. Thousands, literally thousands of software packages are being installed for you. Everything from your email client to your office suite to your software development tools are being pulled down from package mirrors. In my case, this was over 850MB of compressed package files.
• After the package download, answer any configuration questions aptitude (or synaptic) poses.
• Copy your /home directory contents to the new installation.

Compare that to what it takes with either Mac OS X or Windows XP to get all of your applications installed and configured. Even if you don’t know a thing about Linux or even the more technical side of those operating systems, you can tell from the brevity of that set of steps that the Debian setup is remarkably simple. Now, some will already be keying in their comment posts with exclamations of “Hey! There’s DarwinPorts/Fink/Cygwin!” Yeah, each of those is a nice start; however, they pale in comparison. Fink at least has the robust apt/dpkg foundation, but even it has a relatively meager package selection. I am sure I’ll be writing more on life with Fink and DarwinPorts in the near future. I still don’t have half the stuff installed on XP that I plan to use. I get tired just thinking about the installs. 8^)

I just got back from 4S, which happens to be one of my favorite of the large professional association conferences. Ok, 15 minutes to deliver talk is the equivalent of being treated as canned sardines, and thus totally unpleasant, but I feel like I can go to most any talk and find it relevant or interesting to my own work. I t is certainly more manageable too in terms of size than something like the AAAs which also gives you a paltry 15 minutes to present and worse, the association has been treading in some ethically problematic territory lately, so much so, I would rather throw my money to the other AAA. While in Vancover, my Internet access was near to nothing (I was staying with a friend who I have not seen since the summer of 2002, but alas, thanks to chatting we have been in pretty consistent contact). When I came back I came across some discouraging but not so surprising new news on the AAA and their cowardly decision to fight the FRPAA that would mandate open access for articles derived from federally funded research… The cherry on top of the cake was they dissolved the AnthrSource Steering Committee formed precisely to figure out how to open up access, no less! Alex Golub, a Savage Minds blogger, and a now ex-member of AnthroSource committee has written an excellent roundup of the story (link above) and Peter Suber, also has two very nice summaries, including links to the appropriate documentation. This year since I am curtailing my time on the conference circuit, I decided not to go to the AAA conference because frankly I am totally annoyed with the professional organization. I am usually quite proud to be or at least amused after I tell folks that I am am anthropologists (most react as if I had decided to embark on some real courageous path) but I am quite embarrassed about the association that is supposed to represent my interests and the profession at large. The links on SM point to and flesh out the problems with AAA’s refusal to jump on an exciting opportunity to free up some knowledge but I want to just emphasize three of the most problematic parts of their decision: 1.The most offensive part is that in reality the proposed bill is quite conservative in so far as it only asks for what should already be (a) given. That is, if the government is using tax dollars to fund research, it has every right to demand the fruits of such scholarship is made available to tax payers. Right? Given the neoliberal moment we are in, in which the government is retrehcnhing on all sorts of supports, this bill is admirable and I am afraid that if it does not pass it can be easily used by conservatives to justify future cuts of such funds. And given the very uncontroversial nature of the bill, it is not surprising that so many of the social science and humanities associations did not protest the bill… Anthropology sticks out as a sore sore thumb in fact. 2. The AAAs deployed FUD tactics to justify their position saying that open access would jeopardize peer review… Sigh. That is just so off the mark and the AnthroSource steering committee letter addressed this point well. 3. Many anthropologist know first-hand how appalling access outside of Europe, US, Australia, Japan etc, can be, even for academics and thus, AAA’s lack of support for this is also implicitly sanctions the North South Division that have plagued the field and all of academia so long. And for a field that has often been very thoughtful about these power/knowledge dynamics, it is doubly even more stinging… Is there really such a strong disconnect between the association and discplinary ethical currents?

Ran the Golden Apple 5k this morning in neighbouring Forest Park. Local race, a few hundred runners, glorious weather -- what more can you ask for? I didn't feel too pumped and meant to take it easy, but still managed to beat 20 minutes at 19:44 minutes for a 6:22 min/mile pace.

Tonight an European power blackout happened. Some problems in the connection between Germany and France make the network unstable. What is most interesting is that this also affected some Spanish regions and Madrid areas. A Spanish windmill power plant and a gas power plant were disconnected from the network. As Joey say, automatic disconnection of users from the network worked, and it never collapsed, but I am amazed how far the problem reached. Also, some of the problems that Joey describe were due to a lowering of network's frequency, below standard 50Hz.

… which I certainly am not …

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

I had an exhausting and stressing weekend. We had a long long holiday this week in Mexico. Some people had the week until Tuesday and had from Wednesday to Sunday off, because of the Day of the Dead celebration (being Nov 1st and 2nd, and taking Friday 3rd also). I didn’t have any classes, but the Superior Algebra teacher made us attend an exam on Friday and Saturday (9 am and 8 am, respectively). Some of my friends were high and drunk from Tuesday afternoon and will remain that way until tomorrow, while I had to stay at home and work stressing for my poor understanding on the class, trying to study with tons of things on my head, etc. This so much sucks. Anyway, last week, Raquel, Tato, Javier and a friend of Tato managed to go to Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ concert, which was fucking amazing. I love Karen O, her sex appeal and the way she does to put people in the mood is great and lovely. Unfortunately, Rach hasn’t put the pics (we got her digital camera inside the building but was discovered by the staff and forced to put it on a stuff hold table, fuckers) yet, I hope she does soon The best moment of the concert: Date with the Night. Next weekend, the Corona Music Fest will take place in the Azteca stadium, which has me anxious. I can’t wait to watch The Mars Volta on stage. Other nice bands I’m expecting to watch are NOFX, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Resorte, La Gusana Ciega and the Nortec Collective. Here’s the flyer:

Following Joey’s lead, here’s some DWN-style comments on some of the stuff I’ve been involved in or heard of over the past week… A future for m68k has been planned on the release list, after being officially dropped as a release architecture in September. The conclusion of the discussion seems to be that we’ll move the existing m68k binaries from etch into a new “testing-m68k” suite that will be primarily managed by m68k porters Wouter Verhelst and Michael Schmitz, and aim to track the real testing as closely as can be managed. In addition the m68k will aim to make installable snapshots from this, with the aim of getting something as close as possible to the etch release on other architectures. A new trademark policy for Debian is finally in development, inspired by the Mozilla folks rightly pointing out that, contrary to what we recommend for Firefox, our own logos aren’t DFSG-free. Branden Robinson has started a wiki page to develop the policy. The current proposal is to retain two trademark policies – an open use policy for the swirl logo, that can be used by anyone to refer to Debian, with the logo released under an MIT-style copyright license, and left as an unregistered trademark; and an official use license for the bottle-and-swirl logo, with the logo being a registered trademark, but still licensed under a DFSG-free copyright license. The hope is that we can come up with at least one example, and hopefully more, of how to have an effective trademark without getting in the way of people who want to build on your work down the line. Keynote address at OpenFest. Though obviously too modest to blog about this himself, Branden Robinson is currently off in Bulgaria, headlining the fourth annual OpenFest, speaking on the topics of Debian Democracy and the Debian Package Management System. New Policy Team. After a few days of controversy following the withdrawal of the policy team delegation, a new policy team has formed consisting of Manoj Srivastava, Russ Allbery, Junichi Uekawa, Andreas Barth and Margarita Manterola. Point release of sarge, 3.1r4. A minor update to Debian stable was released on the 28th October, incorporating a number of previously released security updates. Updated sarge CD images have not been prepared at this time and may not be created until 3.1r5 is released, which is expected in another two months, or simultaneously with the etch release. Debian miniconf at linux.conf.au 2007. While it may technically not be supposed to be announced yet, there’s now a website for the the Debian miniconf at linux.conf.au 2007, to be held in Sydney on January 15th and 16th (with the rest of the conference continuing until the 20th). This year derived distributions are being explicitly encouraged to participate, so competition is likely to be high, and it’s probably a good idea to get your talk ideas sorted out pretty quickly if you want them to be considered!

I'm brainstorming about ways of setting up Linux desktops machines for people used to Window users on a LAN. It could be any size of LAN.

I'd like people to be able to sit down at any Linux machine on the LAN and log in -- probably use a LDAP directory for that, and NFS-mounted home directories. I wouldn't want to NFS-mount the entire thing for performance reasons.

So, some of the things I'm thinking about are:

• Desktop environment: KDE or Gnome? Which would give Windows users all the tools they'd want? Which would they feel most at home with? I'm thinking it's KDE, but Gnome has a more polished "feel" too it.


• Image management. How could the desktops be updated? Just rsync everything except fstab over? Can we actually have a single system image? Is XOrg powerful enough to just recognize hardware at boot and Do The Right Thing? Can we build a unified initrd somehow?


• Distribution. Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu? Do the Ubuntus bring anything to the table, if we take as a given that an experienced Debian admin is managing all this?


• Laptops. What do we do about the home directories there? Some sort of automated rsync thingy?


• Installation. FAI? Or some homegrown thing that just boots up, partitions, and runs rsync?