September 2011 Archives

So after a year of painful roadblocks, my Active Directory migration is starting to quiet down. I even have a Windows 7 deployment Task Sequence set up through Configuration Manager that lets me get a Windows machine set up with only 10 minutes of face time (~90 minutes actual install time).

I used to brag that I could set up a Linux Workstation faster than Windows 7, but now... what do I do! I was getting Jealous of Windows install times and I couldn't stand it any more.

Equivs to the rescue! One problem I have when setting up new Ubuntu Workstations is ensuring I have all the required packages installed on the machine. This can be done by creating a meta-package. There are two commands to assist you with this,

equivs-control

equivs-build

First use

equivs-control

After that you can build your meta-package using the equivs-build command and passing your control file as the parameter.

The second step for my speedy Linux deployment is a BASH script that goes through and configures Samba, PAM, nsswitch.conf and pam_mount.conf.xml so that the machine is bound to AD, authenticates to AD and mounts shares through AD when users log in. (Most importantly the Documents folder).

Now I can have a Linux workstation up and running in about 30 minutes with 5 minutes of face time! Once again I'm faster than Windows. All is right in the world.

I recently moved all my client workstations over from using NFSv4 mounts to CIFS mounts so as to integrate with U of MN Active Directory a bit better.

As with all migrations, I ran into a snag! When the user's Documents folder is mounted at their login using pam_mount via mount.cifs, symbolic links tend to break. Not all of them, only links with absolute path names on the server.

For example, here's a client's view of a file that's mounted

ls -l
l????????? ? ? ? ? ? .Rprofile

But on the server it looks like this:
ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user domain users 34 2011-09-13 09:01 .Rprofile -> /home/AD/user/r/r_tools/.Rprofile

So to solve this you have to go through and replace all absolute symbolic links with relative symbolic links. I wrote a bash script to do such a thing as I had too many to do by hand, but if you don't have too many, you can fix them by hand.

To find all symbolic links under the directory /search/base:

find /search/base -type l

To find all broken symbolic links under the directory /search/base:

find -L /search/base -type l

Good Luck!