Tim: >> Why do that? It sounds a recipe for disaster. Perhaps if you mention >> why it's too difficult to manage individual IDs per student, someone can >> suggest an easy way of handling that for you. Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन) wrote: > I have a diskless cluster where all clients share the same root (/), > mounted readonly over NFS. That works fine, and I've ironed out some > minor hiccups. /home is RW. > > The usage model is that kids don't regularly use the computers. There > are far too many kids in a government school to effectively share four > computers. But four is a start, and basic familiarisation is > happening. Hence I can't manage one login per student. Besides, > explaining what a password means to a kindergarten kid who doesn't > even speak my language, is simply beyond me. Sounds a good case for logging in using a barcode scanner against the student's library card. Gives you individual users, a simple logon procedure, and something you can expand on over the years (more computers, same students with same logons next year, etc.). > What I've done is that on the server, I've asked GDM to login in user > "user" automagically on boot up, and after timeout. To be honest I'm > just lazy. I should do something where each client has it's own user, > so that host1 logins in user1, and so on. But I was wondering if Gnome > and other apps will let me live with a shared home. Guess they won't. That is another simple option: One user per machine, but not one user for all machines. It avoids two terminals trying to access the same personal files at the same time, but doesn't get around the problem of one user changing settings for the next user. But there are probably some "internet cafe" options for wiping out all customisations and starting a new, each logout and login cycle. > So any ways of making GDM log in different users on different > terminals, other than dynamically generating gdm.conf on system > startup for each terminal? Possibly some integration between DHCP issued hostnames and usernames derived from hostnames, for someone adventurous with scripting... But if you just have four terminals, you may as well take the simple way out and have user1, user2, user3 & user4 preconfigured as the autologon users for each terminal. Diskless terminals can have different files given to them as they bootup, they could share almost everything (hardware configuration, etc.,) except for the files to do with auto-logon. Probably you want to look into some internet cafe solutions, there might be something that suits you. -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
