Linux, LDAP and the impossibility of handling editable PDFs
O. Hartmann
ohartman at zedat.fu-berlin.de
Mon Sep 1 12:57:28 UTC 2008
Konrad Heuer wrote:
>
> On Mon, 1 Sep 2008, O. Hartmann wrote:
>
>> Konrad Heuer wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, 1 Sep 2008, O. Hartmann wrote:
>>>
>>>> Several months ago I tried configuring the Linuxulator on several
>>>> FreeBSD 7.X boxes, most of them pure amd64 and pure 64 bit (as it is
>>>> possible with Intels pseudo 64 bit crap). The reason for that is
>>>> simple. Having FreeBSD (now 7.1-PRE) as my favorite OS on servers
>>>> AND hybrid boxes (acting as workstations AND small servers) makes
>>>> life easy - I thought and was touhgt wrong.
>>>> Our administration sends a lot of PDFs around and as it is very
>>>> usual, our applications, forms and so on for scientific congresses
>>>> etc. are all PDF and subject to be edited. And here it comes that
>>>> FreeBSD seems to be a definite deadend!
>>>> Using pdfedit is wrong, it can't show or edit any PDF we obtained so
>>>> far. Using 'pdftk' fails, it is not made to run in modern 64 bit
>>>> environments only when using FreeBSD (linux seems to have no
>>>> problem, especially Ubuntu does the thing). So, then I remembered
>>>> myself about Linuxulator and tried acrobatviewer - and failed. As in
>>>> other professional environments we were far away from using simple
>>>> user management and therefore there is a LDAP environment. And,
>>>> funny, Linuxulator does not contact LDAP even if I try to configure
>>>> it to use our LDAP environment. Digging around what flavor of Linux
>>>> FreeBSD installs (means: do al ot of work), reading about how to use
>>>> PAM and LDAP on Linux (means: doing again additional work in an
>>>> environment I try to avoid!) and at last no success, because
>>>> something is missing or the Linuxulator should use something for
>>>> user authentication and autorization it does not have and uses
>>>> therefore the FreeBSD stuff and then fails. Especially for the
>>>> Acrobat weirdness (or call it software) something like this occurs
>>>> whenn attempting starting acrobat reader:
>>>>
>>>> (acroread:18831): GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r(): failed due to
>>>> unknown user id (2001)
>>>>
>>>> (acroread:18831): Gdk-WARNING **: shmget failed: error 12 (Cannot
>>>> allocate memory)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If there is someone here running a 64 bit environment within a LDAP
>>>> realm and already got successfully running the Linux add ons as
>>>> expected for LDAP users, you are really welcome to give me some
>>>> hints how to turn around my frustration and thoughts about
>>>> definitely leaving the FreeBSD path ...
>>>
>>> I use a simple workaround to make the Adobe reader (and some other
>>> Linux binaries) work - I simply added following entries to the
>>> crontab file of root:
>>>
>>> 00 05 * * * /usr/bin/getent passwd | /usr/bin/sed '1,/nobody/d' >
>>> /usr/compat/linux/etc/passwd 2> /dev/null
>>> 15 05 * * * /usr/bin/getent group > /usr/compat/linux/etc/group 2>
>>> /dev/null
>>>
>>> Hope that helps a little bit ...
>>
>> Thank you very much, this works.
>> But this seems to be a hack, unclean in my opinion. As I got responses
>> earlier of the year for a similar problem, Linuxulator should utilize
>> lacking facilities from FreeBSD host system - but obviously it
>> doesn't, especially if there are non-existent users. As I realized -
>> and this puzzles me - there was no passwd file in my configuration, so
>> I guess the Linuxulator has to contact the underlying FreeBSD
>> infrastructure to get UIDs like root and others - but this seems not
>> to be the case.
>
> I agree a little bit. When we used YP years ago it was possible to edit
> /usr/compat/linux/etc/yp.conf to make the Linux binaries contact the NIS
> service.
>
> Making use of LDAP should work in an similar way. Of course my
> "solution" is a hack - but not the worst one. ;-)
>
> Best regards
>
> Konrad Heuer
> GWDG, Am Fassberg, 37077 Goettingen, Germany, kheuer2 at gwdg.de
>
In the days of NIS/YP the Linuxulator worked very well the way you
described, so I expecte LDAP working for me. But whatever I tried to
configure (also a complete Linux-based config!), I never had success,
especially when it comes to UIDs.
Your 'hack' works for me, thank you very much.Regards,
Oliver
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