>> reboot. > > Ok, but it just sounds strange for someone who has only been using > Unix-like systems for the last 10 years. > Strange, but harmless. More practical and trustowrthy than Windows' Ctrl-Alt-Del.
> Ok, so a terminal is really a single-user "terminal", unlike a > "workstation". > You can see the additional security in that, can't you? > Hmmm, ... I'm used to say that a machine should only be powered on > once and that you should login only once ... so rebooting is not an > option. > Things change... Note that in Plan 9 terminals and their users are not tightly coupled. None of the terminals ought to be customised to a user's requirements or, putting it a different way, all of them are. So "logging off" leaves the terminal where someone else can make use of it. Windows has a complex system to provide this type of "roaming profile" and it's a nightmare, Plan 9 has it built in right at the grass-root level and it works faultlessy. > The long term plan would be to setup an auth-, a CPU- and a > file-server and to use thin clients as terminals. However, I don't > know yet (a) if the AMD Geode based thin clients I have are supported > and (b) how to configure the server(s) to let them boot via PXE. > I think Ron Minnich has done a lot of work with the Geode, he may be able to guide you there. > I'll start with the setup of an auth/CPU/fileserver and then a thin > client to see how all of this works. > That would be my choice, too, except I chose to run AUTH separately a long time ago and I still am not sure that it wasn't overkill. I regret believing that AUTH can run on a 386: it does, but it's not wise, every time you run AWK on a machine without floating point hardware you crash it. That gets irritating. ++L
