We are a public library with 10 locations. I have been providing computer
access to the public using ltsp thin clients on PIIs for the past 8 years
and it has worked very well for us. I've been able to acquire 100 refurbed
P4 Dells with 1G ram so we can move to ltsp 5. We have 2 classes of public
computers. the first provides access to our catalog and database services
which we subscribe to. Access to these machines is completely open and we
are running these as ltsp 5 fatclients now.
The 2nd group provides full internet access to our patrons. With LTSP 4
using icewm thin clients machines were autologged in once per day. The user
is presented with a blank screen and a login prompt created using Xdialog.
When a user logs in they are authenticated using their library card and a
pin for a guest card number. They respond to a usage agreement and firefox
launches. Usage is tracked on the authentication server and they may use any
of the computers available for a total of 1hour per day.
Migrating this class of machines has not been successful. We have rewritten
the authentication/timing software in Ruby. This runs as a web application
on a remote server. The same scenario exists for the client as it did under
ltsp 4. The machine is autologged in and ltsp-remoteapps is run as a startup
job from ubuntu desktop to connect to the auth server and present the login
screen. The login takes place and a count down timer is placed on the users
desktop. The user may initiate a logout or the logout will take place when
the 1 hour limit is exhausted.
My problem:
1. The client again is completely locked down using Pesselus. The user views
a blank desktop. Applications are not accessible from the panel or right
clicking. When a login is succesful I want to copy shortcuts to the desktop
to make the applications available. The copy is done successfully by using a
hook from the login app to call a script running on the server. The
shortcuts do not appear on the client desktop because this requires the
client desktop to be refreshed from the client side using 'killall
nautilus".
2. After a users session I would like to do a clean logout using
gnome-session-save. This must also be called from the client space.
3. After a successful logout and before a successful login I need to refresh
the desktop with rsync so the next user receives a fresh working environment
and the desktop shortcuts are removed. This can be done from the server and
my question here is what is the best time to do this so that no files are
prevented from being updated by rsync.
The question of initiating a client shutdown remotely seems to appear
frequently but I'm not seeing any good solutions if they are out there.
There are some references in the listserv archives which point to running
sshd on each client and yesterday there was an announcement about xexit.
I'll be looking at these both today.
I would greatly appreciate hearing any thoughts you might have about the
cleanest way to do this.
Dan Landry
Santa Cruz Public Library
[email protected]
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