Certificate Auto Enrollment from Samba

Certificate Auto Enrollment available in Samba 4.16

Certificate Auto Enrollment allows devices to enroll for certificates from Active Directory Certificate Services. As of Samba 4.16, Linux clients can now auto enroll for certificates just like a Windows client.

Samba’s Certificate Auto Enrollment uses the certmonger service to keep track of certificates. It also uses the cepces plugin to certmonger. The sscep command is also used to download the trust chain.

Certificate Auto Enrollment is compatible with both Winbind and SSSD.

Certificate Auto Enrollment is initiated using Samba’s Group Policy client, samba-gpupdate. The Samba wiki has more details on how to setup Group Policy, and how to configure Certificate Auto Enrollment.

Administrative Tools AppImage

I’ve created an appimage here for the various admin tools modules I’ve been working on. I wrote a previous blog article about this, but I lost some history when I borked my wordpress database and didn’t have a backup.

Group Policy Management Console for Linux

I’m working on a YaST module that imitates the behavior of the Group Policy Management Console in linux.

You can install it on openSUSE Tumbleweed via:
sudo zypper in yast2-python-bindings
sudo zypper ar https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/samba:/STABLE/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ samba
sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper in yast-gpmc

Then run it with:
yast2 gpmc

It requires yast2-python-bindings version 4.0+, which is only available in openSUSE Tumbleweed at the moment (although it’ll be in the next version of SLE).

YaST and Python, the new bindings

YaST has had python bindings for about 10 years, but there has been no maintainer for the last 4 years, and they’ve slowly gone kaput.

That has changed. Python+YaST is back. The syntax is (or should be) backwards compatible with <= 3.x of the yast-python-bindings, but you can now write python yast via code very similar to the ruby code.
There are also lots of examples now (thanks to noelp and his hackweek project).

We’re working on a couple of yast modules via the yast-python-bindings:
https://github.com/dmulder/yast-gpmc
https://github.com/noelpower/yast-aduc/tree/wip-aduc

Corporate email on gnome-shell with davmail + geary + california

My new favorite corporate email solution is davmail + geary + california in gnome-shell.

Geary is still a little buggy (version 0.8.3), but I love how light weight it is, while still doing (most of) what I need it to. It really needs html signature support, but that’s the only thing missing that I really use.

Davmail appears to be very stable. I run it in server mode on startup with an init script.

Now all I need is a decent calendar solution. The new gnome app California appears to be the best bet. It’s very buggy in version 0.2. My biggest issue is that overlapping events aren’t handled well. I’m hoping they’ve got that worked out in 0.4.

It feels more fluid using native gnome-shell apps for my corporate email and calendar. Thanks Yorba and davmail!