I recently made the decision to upgrade all of our net-booted X terminals
to full-blown workstations. (Basically, adding a hard drive and some
memory.) Having 19 people running Netscape remotely on our Alpha is
sucking up a gig of RAM and almost two gigs of swap, not to mention the
"normal" things the Alpha has to do...
After fighting off (quite violently, I might add) the top-level
management who wanted to "just give everyone a Windows 98 machine - I
never have any problems with mine at home...!", I came up with the
following:
-- Celeron 700-ish, 100Mb FXP, 20G, 64 or 128M, S3 or ATI Rage video
-- NIS for uname/passwd auth - any user can use any machine
-- /home mounted via NFS off a master file server for the users' files
-- everything else (with whatever exceptions I find) on the local HD.
-- (suggestions???)
The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice,
Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet.
I'm planning on building a fairly big machine to do world builds on to
keep these machines (30-ish) all synced to the same OS version, probably
with weekly installworlds on them.
Questions
---------
Handling the OS updates is pretty easy... Is there any equally easy way
to keep a particular set of ports updated automatically? I'd like to
avoid having to do a "make deinstall; make install" all the time...
For security reasons, is there a good package out there that can reliably
determine when an X session has become idle for a period of time (no
mouse/keyboard activity) and "nicely" log that session out? (Assuming
programs that "nicely" handle KILLs...)
Is there a program out there that can trigger my holodeck to create a
solid-matter hand that can come out of the cooling vents and beat the
hell out of any user who tries to hit the power switch? :)
--mike
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