package: debian-edu-install
severity: wishlist

It would be great if one could be (optionaly) prompted to enter a different IP
address for the network, gateway and tjener (and thus all machines).

Several organisations use different network settings and need to change our
settings, making the installation harder than it should be. Having a router
and a network is very common today, but it's quite uncommon for them to be
set to 10.0.2.1 and 10.0.2.0/23 like our settings requiere.

IMO the best would be an extra kernel commandline parameter to trigger a set
of debconf questions.

Something for wheezy, /me thinks :)


cheers,
	HOlger

Hi!

What is really the use case for this? I can see two that the user thinks
about:

1) There is already a network set up that the user wants to use.

This will fail if there is already a DHCP server on that network (which
I guess it often is) since Debian-edu provides its own. It will also
fail if the network is already using some of the IP addresses Debian-edu
has preconfigured. Is the request here to be able to configure all of
the network config to appropriate IP addresses in the existing network?

2) User already has a router that he wants to use.

If this is not the rare case that there is a dedicated network set up
with no DHCP server (but with other network config than Debian-edu
uses), it should be easy to configure that network with the correct
settings. This should just be to add a switch and connect to an unused
port of the existing router, or add another software based (e.g.
IPCop/floppyfw) or hardware based router.

yes, thats not uncommon in 2011 :-)

yes.



cheers,
	Holger

[Marius Bjørnstad Kotsbak 2011-07-04]

It will break a lot of features, if not done right.

In Squeeze and Wheezy, we provide a script subnet-change taking care of
changing the IP network on the server, and as the clients should be
using dynamic setup (might be missing samba and munin setup), clients
should just adapt to the IP setup on the main server and most stuff will
just work.

We could extend this during installation to collect the subnet to use in
d-i, and call subnet-change automatically at the end of the first boot
to adjust LDAP and all other parts that need to change and finish off
with a reboot. :)

Something for Jessie?

Hi,

Closing this bug report as it will not happen any time soon.

We are discussing scenarios where tjener is hosted in a municipality
data center and school servers are satellites to this main tjener.
However, the local schoolnetwork will likely still be 10/8 (or 10/9,
10/10, 10/11, etc.) and the school server (satellite will be at
10.0.2.2). (The connection between municipality data center tjener and
satellite tjener on the school network will likely be via a
wireguard/openvpn connection and using some backbone network for LDAP
sync etc.

Long story cut short, closing this bug report with tag "wontfix".

Mike