I will be attending Debconf 9 in Spain from July 23-30. I will also be attending debcamp the previous week. I’m hoping to build contacts and increase my involvement in the Debian community, and the previous debconf I attended was an interesting window into what was going on in Debian and Linux.
I’m still lining up things to do at Debcamp. Jelmer Vernooij will be there; he’s interested in working with me on Samba 4 support for MIT Kerberos in Debian. I’m interested in working with him on making the user experience good for people who use both Samba 4 and other Kerberos applications.
As I wrote at the bottom of this post, I believe it is critical that the open source community not just follow what Microsoft is doing in the Enterprise space. I also think it is important that we maintain avenues for our own innovation. To that end, I want to look at what we can do to use enterprise infrastructure independent of AD-look-alike projects like Samba as well. So, I’ll be looking at making what I can do to help this in Debian. Areas of interest include:
- Easy set up of Kerberos to use an LDAP database
- Easy configuration of libpam-krb5 and libpam-ldap together using Kerberos for authentication and LDAP for authorization but not authentication.
- Support for FAST integrated into Debian systems so we can gain better protection against weak passwords. As I promised, more about this in its own post.
- Better support for PKI/smart cards for network authentication.
These are all projects I think I could make headway on myself. However the value of debcamp is the other people there. I’ve never been to a debcamp before and so I don’t know what it will be like. I do know that I will give higher priority to projects that will benefit from close cooperation over a week. So, if you’re there and want to try to recruit me to your project, feel free. I’m interested in enterprise infrastructure, VOIP, IPv6, network security and making complex infrastructure easy to use.