On Wednesday 29 May 2002 12:08 am, Derek Dresser wrote: > the > workstations mount all the file systems (except their home directories) > READ-ONLY, so there is no danger of the students affecting the operating > system. The only files that the students have permissions to affect are > their own files in their home directories, so the only thing they can > affect or "mess-up" is their own home directory.
But this IS a problem, more so than a windows user messing up their home directory, as just about everything the user runs from the desktop to applications will default to reading its config files from the home directory. Of course the problem is not insurmountable :) I've just spent quite a lot of time 'securing' a school LTPS setup so the kiids can't misconfigure things, or that when they do, the misconfiguration is repaired next time they run an application or log in. KDE 3 helps in this regard as it's configuration files can marked as immutable - so (on my SuSE 8.0 setup) you can put config files in /opt/kde3/share/config and if you stick a [$i] at the top of the files, then the local settings in the users home directory cannot override the master settings. This sorts out kde applications nicely. For the non kde applications we use, such as Mozilla and OpenOffice, we have a 'golden' user with a known good setup. Then, instead of running these applications directly, we've set the menus and panel icons to run a script which first copies over the config files for that application from the golden user, and then edits them as necessary in order to do things like replace /home/golden with /home/currentuser, before finally actually running the application. Additionally, we have a couple of things which go off in the XStartup script to prepare/repair the home directory when the kids log in. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
