Hi We also have been struggeling with faulty gnome user session which doesn't get cleaned up, during logout. Always we had a lots of user zombie processes running on the server.
Now I programmed the gnome-watchdog scripts which solve the issues for us. Your welcome to test this beta packages, which is upto know working with Feisty. To install the package do the following steps: 1.) install gtkdialog apt-get install gtkdialog 2.) download the package http://www.morokeni.ch/edubuntu/gnome-watchdog_0.9_i386.deb 3.) and install the package like this: dpkg -i gnome-watchdog_0.9_i386.deb More infos about the scripts please read below ... I hope they are useful for you... Philipp ------------------------- gnome-watchdog - cleans up gnome user session of Edubuntu and checks if a user is logged in already. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It happens with Edubuntu that user processes continue to live, even though the user isn't logged in anymore. That's not a really nice thing, because these zombie processes running in the background consume memory and cpu from the server. Now the question is how can we get rid of these processes? Let us have a look at the current situation: There are different use cases, how these user zombie processes are created: (1) Users are lazy. Instead of logging out properly they just press the power button (hard reset) (2) The user is using CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE (killing the X11 session) to log out. (3) User is logged out normally, but some faulty program doesn't get terminated. (4) A program is freezing the thin client completely, which forces the user to reboot the thin client. (5) In some cases It can even be that these remaining processes prevent a user login with the same user. These scripts take care that a faulty gnome user session gets cleaned up, when a user isn't logged in anymore ... How does it work: During a gnome login process a watchdog script (called gnome-watchdog) starts. The special thing about this script is, that it starts with the command nohup. Starting like that the gnome-watchdog script is ignoring any hangup signals. Which means this script survives even if the user is logging out in the normal way (3) or unexpectedly (1,2,4+5). Basically the script is waiting in a loop, until the process gnome-panel get terminated. In case this is happening, he waits a certain period to be sure that the process doesn't get restarted by his parent process. If this isn't happening the script assumes that the user isn't logged in anymore. Now the cleaning process takes place. The scripts checks if any user process under this user id are still running. If yes, he kill all these user processes. Based of some testing with these method you should get 99% of the cases 2 and 3 solved. Unfortunately if the user is doing a hard reset (1), it happens that almost all process including the gnome-panel process is running as zombie processes. Sometimes it happens, that after a while the gnome-panel get terminated, which will also led that remaining process get killed by the watchdog script. But when the process gnome-panel of this user is surviving, it can happen that the same user isn't able to login anymore (5). Now these script brings for that also a solution, but it must be manually activated. For that just create the file like this: touch /etc/check_previous_login When this feature is activated, the script gnome-watchdog-start will check during a user login, if there is already a gnome-panel is running. If yes the user will be notified by a message box, that a previous session is still running. The user has now the option to kill this previous session, before he logs in. May is imported to know also these facts: - All actions from the scripts get logged, to the syslog daemon (/var/log/messages). - The script doesn't get executed for user root, schoolnet and teacher (see script). - The script only get started when you you choose gnome as session and when you doing a thin client login. Please note these scripts are only tested for about two weeks. Up to now we had good experiences with them. Anyway be warned that may they are still faulty somehow. So if you use them and your system and your server starting to kill users without a notice, may is better to remove them before doing further troubleshooting. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SchoolNet NA - Youth Empowerment through Information and Communication Technology SchoolNet Namibia provides sustainable, low cost technology solutions and internet access, as well as technical support, training services and rich educational content to schools, community-based educational organisations, and educational practitioners throughout Namibia. www.schoolnet.na -- edubuntu-users mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users
