[gentoo-user] LTSP and firefox woes

[Bruno Lustosa]

Hello, folks. I sent this to the list 2 weeks ago, and I'm not sure it came through.
I'm resending it now. I'd be greatly pleased if someone could help me on this issue.


We have a number of old machines hanging diskless on a fairly nice LTSP box.
So, this is a good server with a bunch of 6-7 machines using X remotely.
No problem at all, everything working fine...
... that is, until one of them hangs.
Certain old machines tend to hang a lot, and when they hang, their processes running
on the server don't die, or at least don't die immediately.
When they are rebooted and log on again, certain applications won't run, either
complaining about lock files (OO.org), about another running instance of itself
(firefox), or mibehaving because of existing files in /tmp (gnome with orbit files).
There are other applications behaving like this.
Anyone here using LTSP ever done any workaround to this? I thought about making
a wrapper script to gdm so that when someone logs on, before starting anything at
all (window manager et all), it would kill every running process on the server except
itself, and only then pass control to the window manager.
This is an ugly hack, I know, but I don't see a straightforward solution (apart from
buying loads of new expensive machines). It seems to be a problem between X client
and X server. In my opinion, the client windows should die if the corresponding X server
is not there anymore, but that's not what happens.

--
Bruno Lustosa, aka Lofofora          | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Network Administrator/Web Developper | ICQ: 1406477
Rio de Janeiro - Brazil              |