 Thank you. Yeah, okay. I'm you have and I came to talk about boba.org Which is a project of our company and it's basically the purpose of it is to manage Linux desktops in large scale in Finnish schools So a target market is schools, but I'm me I've been free software hobbyist for about two decades now and working at offices over 10 years for now So what is our company? We employ about 15 people and we provide IT solutions to schools and while we do some other things We I think the primary thing that we do is that we maintain What large number of Linux desktop computers in primary and secondary schools? I'd say that we maintain over 5,000 active What does active mean what something like? hosts which are daily used By people around 5,000 and maybe there are something like 10,000 less active used And we also manage a lot more user accounts. We Employ about two software developers usually. I'm the other one. We also have Other kinds of people product managers help desktops people people with teaching backgrounds and so on so how we started out At the time we started out the market police was dominated by a Microsoft Windows pretty much and we had a simple Business plan we are going to provide LTS Peter schools LTSP stands for Linux terminal server project And we provided you want to know more Firefox open office and and such and I think it was a pretty good business plan the the idea was to provide Services that are needed by schools in a cheap way And it was good enough at that time. I think But times have changed now it's Apple with iPads and Google has Chromebooks and services They're competing with Microsoft and I feel that we feel that seen clients are not quite up to modern standards as a technology and LTSP feels a bit outdated. I think Remote X does not really well for all all use cases very well so basically we have had to say goodbye to LTSP and Most important reason for that is that we mostly target laptops to these days laptops are the most used kind of device in school environments and LTSP doesn't really help with that We also do provides and discuss workstations With shared home directors in server and these reasonable more like LTSP fat clients We started with Ubuntu, but then canonical did a bit of a trick to us I think and to other people as well They changed the IP policy in 2015 and I still think that you can read that on the Canonical web pages you can redistribute Ubuntu But only way there has been a modification to it and we certainly did modifications to our Ubuntu and we thought about this that are we going to talk about canonical about this or what are We going to do and we decided not to take any legal risks and we decided to make a switch to DBN So, okay, what is Puavo? It's basically the system that we Developed to service our customers and it consists of two components mostly There's the Puavo web which is web software for user and device management And then there's the OS operating system, which is basically a special build of a DBN Linux operating system and it's been free software a long time But we just haven't marketed it as much. It's basically not community-developed system We just use it for ourselves to service our customers and I suppose it shows in some details that it's not a Product that is easy to start using by outsiders But it's there it's available for everyone to actually if you want to do similar things you can try it out And what our goals are system, which of course we started to provide a good system for education We wanted to be maintainable by a few admins yet scalable to large environments We want to support computers for a long time I think 10 years is about in the ballpark that if a computer is over 10 years old It's time to move on to more modern machines. I think but what we tried and currently we require 64-bit support 32-bit only computers are a bit outdated. It's time to move on We tried to be reasonable secure, but we're not the bank. So we're perfect We do not want to try to depend on Technologists by the big three IT companies American companies Of course the tech by those can be used with our system but we would not like to have a hard dependency on on these companies and Yesterday Shane James Shubin gave a talk about configuration management engines and languages and These are nice and and we use some of that as well but we have not seen much of open source written with those languages and We try to change that a bit. It would be nice to have a system administration system administration code released as open source Which could be used to build systems used actually used in the real world We have Pova has a two different major components the web part is the other one. It's a Ruby on Rails application, but unusually we do not use a relational database we use LDAP for it and This is for some reasons We we use a separate database for each organization, but we can use one central installation for all organizations We use MIT Kerberos, which can be used to provide a single sign on which is good so that people don't have to log in to different Separately log into each web application that they need to use and For each organization can have its own school servers and we can keep a organizations organizations specific copy of the database as a ring only copy on the school servers The web has user management part. It has pretty much the standard stuff that you would expect to such a thing to have it has Hierarchies of entities and some usual users can have special permissions to do things such as change a student passwords if they want to We can also provide LDAP access to external applications such as Moodle so that you can use directly the user database for Authentication as such and we can also use to some extent External user databases as a source for user information. We have some Microsoft AD integration Mostly, I think that is it We also have device management We have a we keep a database of devices in school and the poor work can be used to manage poor OS hosts to some extent and Effective functionality and we also gather a bit of information how the devices are used and Then there's a poor OS part. We currently based on DB and stretch Buster is almost ready for production This is something that would could say a few words on The we tend to be a bit conservative. We still certainly prefer to follow the DB unstable releases I think we are a bit slow a bit too slow in following that but but still it's it's the best environment for Schools, I think slow-moving reliable is good We used to be best on LTSP, but we have diverged because of the laptop issue and We no longer have LTSP as a dependency if you actually want a school environment with LTSP The school alien looks is an option. I think they had a stand here Yeah, and how we distribute the poor OS it's we basically make a squash office image Which is compressed read-only disk image and we updated it updated automatically without any disruption for users So so in the ideal case and it works pretty well users never notice any update updates in any way The desktop is GNOME 3 but GNOME 3 in its default setting is a bit Strange for people I think so we behave tweak it with extensions to behave more like Windows which is something that they are being used to and We provide basically those standard stuff that you would expect to have in a free software desktop environment and We have some special features. I think This is a bit crazy and strange I think we use the same system image for different hosts that can have different Modes of functioning and we basically use the same system image for boot servers laptops and diskless workstations So basically how we do it We build an image and then we put the image on the host and before we give control to system D We use our special init tricks to set it up the environment so that this functions properly in that role so boot servers configure themselves as NFS servers before system D takes over and Then we can put a diskless workstation using the same image Through NPD and then the diskless workstation is going to be configured as an NFS client and Then they work together And maybe it's a bit strange But it works for us because we can then use the same installer and same update mechanism for each each type of host We also provide automatic power of when idle during non-school hours guest logings other strange features What about Google is it an friend or an enemy in practice schools need environments for collaboration It's not simply enough to have hosts and computers and networks and and applications There needs to be some kind of environment that they collaborate in and in practice Our system tends to get paired with Google apps for education, which is on the other hand It's a good thing because if that didn't exist I think we would be a schools would probably use something like Microsoft Office online or something like that And we would be in trouble. They used to be Interoperability issues with the Linux browsers in in fact you had to fake the user agent For it to work things have gotten a bit better these days But it may be partially because of the Google apps for education And sometimes it feels as if we have become a thin client provide for proprietary Google app services and It's it's a bit problematic for the previous point of view. I think Sometimes it feels as if we are Teaching children how to use spyware in schools even though I realized that they don't They promise that they don't actually exploit the data The so maybe there could be a privacy conscious school market out there. This is something that we might do in the future The next level looks interesting collaboration office Things like that, but at the moment it feels that in the Finland There is no market for these people are just content to use the Google services But I have heard or understood that in some other countries such as Germany The the politics and the legal legalities are such that The it's not just so simple such as a poor student or children data to American companies So this might be an interesting Development that we should do but it hasn't happened yet What we also need is better documentation and we should probably fix issues so that everything more works more like out of the Box currently what we do appears to be something as if it's done by administrators to other administrators Which is which is true, and you should realize it if you try it out The this one one image to rule them all the strategy is is also good, but it's not perfect Maybe something like GUICs or NICs OS is something that we might want to look into in the future So if you if you want to deploy Linux desktops desktops or laptops in schools If you have Just ten hosts to maintain don't bother with this if you have a hundred I don't know what you should do if you have a thousand. This might be just what you need We also have a they are also a few schools that use our technology in Switzerland and in Germany with some experience Okay, this is not related forget everything that I said this is not related to what we what I just talked I just want to give a quick note in which other way Linux is present in Finnish schools And this is not related to guava in the final year of upper secondary school there are final examinations that have been digital for some years now and The examination software for that is proprietary. I have heard that someday that might actually change It would be a very good thing, but so far it hasn't happened but anyway for the examination the students must provide their own laptops and their examination System the client side is is Delivered as in USB drives and it's a Linux system based on Debian And this creates a strong incentive for high school students by Linux compatible hardware because they have to provide their own in the final examination and If you go to Finland in some computer source, you might see this Sticker on the on the computers which basically says that it's this computer is final examination compatible It basically means that it's Linux compatible, but it's marketed as such because that's what the students care about So, okay, we have one minute for questions if you have any please shoot Thank you. I'd like to know how do you perform the initial installation on the laptops of your image? We have our own installer for it. Sorry, we have our own installer for it. We basically partition it ourselves and They basically takes about three minutes on a fast network if it takes more than that Somebody's going to complain so it has to be very fast. We basically just create the file systems and then copy the necessary files in place the laptops which are then installed with this poor system are they then Dependent on having a connection to the server or can they also be taken elsewhere and like used independently without a connection to the Yes, they can absolutely. That's absolutely a requirement that laptops can be Can function without a network connection and Don't really need a connection to power or centralized power server for functioning What makes a school environment unique for device management? What makes it different from other? situations where you manage devices on a large scale Well, it has to there's no time It's actually a good question and it didn't it isn't necessary. So I think the school environments are the the Requirements are pretty uniform mostly. So so if one what this is not something that I would push to developers because developers would like to Install this and that and do that and that and so on so so it's the requirements are pretty uniform And for that reason so that everything works without a hitch is is the the main requirement Okay, okay. Thank you for your talk