Peter Billson wrote:
Now that I have it working, I want to get rid of it. I'm in a
library/kiosk terminal situation, and it seems like a real
waste of resources to autologin, but then autologout in case the
patron just walked away with their credit card number in a cache
somewhere in the browser (I rebuild the home directory each time). So
our machines sit there and cycle through the login process. Ugh.
Does anyone know a way to remotely login or logout a kiosk machine
with GDM? It would be great if the librarians
could just start a session on one of the kiosk machines without
having to hand out passwords or walk over to the
machine to start the session.
Joe,
I use xscreensaver and PAM mySQL (and KDM but GDM would work too) to
control the patron's sessions.
1) The kiosk uses autologin when started then the screensaver locks
the screen.
2) Depending on the library, the patron gets a password from either a
librarian or by scanning their library card at a self-serve terminal.
3) When the password is assigned a script is run to clean up the
previous session - i.e. close all open programs, delete any saved
files, etc.
4) After the user logs in, the password is changed so the one the
patron knows is no longer valid.
5) The station re-locks in one of three ways:
a) If the patron walks away the screensaver will activate
re-locking the station
b) I provide a "Log Out" icon that cleans up the patron's session
and activates the screensaver.
c) A timer script activates the screensaver when the patron's
allotted time is up.
6) I have set up a script so that the library can deactivate the
screensaver without passwords (like when the library is giving a
class) but the problem I have found in using this generally is that in
the rush after school kids will just pounce on an open computer. The
kid who requested the session often finds someone sitting at the
computer that the librarian just assigned to him/her.
Pete Billson
That sounds like an interesting approach. The swipe card thing would be
interesting to learn more about, though it doesn't really apply to us as
we're a small rural library. We're lucky if the user has ever had a
library card. And we get so many latch-key kids right after school that
handing out one-time passwords would be a pain. Actually, I was thinking
about this and came up with the following:
The autologin script has to be called every time the client initiates a
connection with GDM (There's probably
a more standard XDMCP nomenclature for this) . So that script is where
the wiggle room is; it can be built to
return a bad username until the librarian takes some action. I fooled
around with this idea yesterday and wrote an XML-RPC client autologin
script in python that makes a request to an XML-RPC enabled web
application to get the username. The web app is of course controlled by
the library staff, and if they enable the kiosk then a good username is
returned to the autologin script and the patron can start using the
kiosk. It appears to work as expected. The only hacky bit is getting GDM
to rerun the script, and the worst case solution is that the patron just
hits the disconnect button on the login screen after the librarian has
assigned them to a terminal, and then a very short timed login starts.
This can probably be done by the web app as well, killing off the
connection from the server side.
J. Toman
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