[gentoo-soc] Progress Report - Gentoo Cluster LiveCD

[Eric Thibodeau <kyron@neuralbs.com>]

I've been working on the project on and off for over a month but the 
work path is converging. What I have done for the moment:

- Successful catalyst build of a liveCD (entirely built with gcc 4.3 as 
an added bonus, which is useful for compiling OpenMP-able code in an HPc 
context)
- Gorg installed with Gentoo xml checkout for documentation
- VMWare environment for devving the ebuilds and testing the 
auto-configuration stuff

Yesterdy we confirmed that we will be using OpenLDAP as the 
authentication mechanism which implies the following:
- have to pre-populate the openldap DB
- have to pre-configure nss_ldap and pam_ldap
- have to provide for proper user admin tools
** I've been using luma as a GUI front end for user management but I 
personaly find it...uhm..sketchy. If anyone has suggestions on and 
interface to mange users under LDAP I'm opened to suggestions (note that 
I am also looking into app-admin/diradm for the CLI management aspect)

I have yet to finalize how the auto-configuration of the ldap backend 
will be performed (script? pkg_config? spearate meta-ebuild?). I'll be 
providing a simple ldiff to pre-populate the DB with the basic tree 
which would look something like this:

dn: ou=gentoo,dc=cluster,dc=local
ou: gentoo
objectClass: top
objectClass: organizationalUnit
description : gentoo

dn: ou=Group,ou=gentoo,dc=cluster,dc=local
ou: Group
objectClass: top
objectClass: organizationalUnit
description : Group defined under gentoo

dn: ou=People,ou=gentoo,dc=cluster,dc=local
ou: People
objectClass: top
objectClass: organizationalUnit
description : People defined under gentoo

dn: cn=Manager,ou=gentoo,dc=cluster,dc=local
objectClass: organizationalRole
cn: Manager

While at it, I'm also trying this out on openldap-2.4.10 which just got 
into the tree and has some reall cool new features like "Multi-Master 
support" (redundancy/availability + better caching) and "Reverse Group 
Membership" (merging group membership, things like group of groups...if 
I read this correctly). I don't expect the features to be excessively 
interesting for the current project but these are definitely a + for 
anyone building an AD replacement (that is, until Samba4 comes out ;)

Eric
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