The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university infrastructure. In this case, it is the university LDAP server, Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file servers.
I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working. Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to .uio.no.
This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name, so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the university servers.
My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu uses.