1.Gateway to access to the Virtual Machines

• harry.medicis.polytechnique.fr is the gateway machine to access to our samba network of development machines.

• harry.medicis.polytechnique.fr hosts a Cent Os operating system and is reachable from anywhere via ssh or .

• development virtual machines are reachable from harry.medicis.polytechnique.fr via ssh or NX.

2.Development Virtual Machines

• The development virtual machines are members of a samba network domain named MAGIX.

• The official name of the hosted operating system is used to designate a given development virtual machine

• The development virtual machines were set up to compile TeXmacs without any additional installation

• The virtual machines hosting a Linux operating system are reachable via ssh or NX.

• The windows-server-2008-r2-std is reachable using rdesktop. To be able to use rdesktop from harry.medicis.polytechnique.fr, put the -X -C option when you ssh to harry.medicis.polytechnique.fr.

• The available development virtual machines are :

  1. centos-5.6-i386

  2. debian-6.0.0-i386

  3. debian-6.0.0-amd64

  4. fedora-14-i386

  5. fedora-14-x86_64

  6. mandriva-linux-free-2010.2-i586

  7. mandriva-linux-free-2010.2-amd64

  8. ubuntu-11.04-desktop-i386

  9. ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64

  10. windows-server-2008-r2-std

3.Add a new Virtual Machine to the samba network domain MAGIX

1. Make sure that your new virtual machine is in the same private network as the old ones.

2. Install samba and winbind in your new virtual machine.

3. Rewrite the /etc/samba/smb.conf to configure your new virtual machine as a member of the MAGIX domain. For your convenience, unless rewriting the smb.conf file, you can copy the /etc/samba/smb.conf file from one of the old virtual machines, edit it and just change the netbios name and the server string values.

4. Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf file and add winbind in the passwd: and group: fields.

5. Allow the samba-client udp ports (137/udp and 138/udp) by configuring the firewall of the new virtual machine. In some Linux distributions (for example Ubuntu) this is automatically done when you install samba-winbind.

6. Join the MAGIX domain by typing the following command in a terminal:

   $ net rpc join -w MAGIX -U root

   You will be prompted to enter your samba root password in order to join the MAGIX domain.

7. Restart winbind service and type the following command to control if every thing is running well:

   $ wbinfo -u $ getent passwd $ getent group

   If things are running well the accounts information from the MAGIX domain will appear.

8. Make sure you that winbind starts automatically at boot after the network and than restart your virtual machine.

9. Try to log-on using your domain account login and password. If you can't logon, this mean that you need to reconfigure the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) of your virtual machine to be able to use your MAGIX domain account exactly like a local account. So logon again into your virtual machine by using a local account and reconfigure PAM.

10. When it is necessary, the reconfiguring of the PAM is different from one Linux distribution to another. So we advise to look to the corresponding distributions HOWTO configure PAM for winbind authenthication pages.

4.Handling of the NX technology

Each of our virtual machines hosts a NX Server. NX is a protocol for graphical remote connections allowing connections on links with low bandwidth or high latency and secured by SSH. Other advantages of the NX technology are session persistence, a very easy multiplatform installation and can act as proxy for VNC and RDP connections. To use the Nx Server you must install NX Client on your machine.

To install a NX Client on your machine, visit the NoMachine website, download the Nx Client corresponding to your platform and follow the instruction for installation and configuration. For the configuration of each virtual machine, you will need the NX Server's public key, which you can find in the public/keys folder of the SVN Tree.