[Lancaster] Re: the kitchen network.

[Ken Hough]

Martyn Welch wrote:
> ------ Original message ------
> On Tuesday 20 Jul 2004 23:27, Andy Baxter wrote:
> 
> 
>>why not do it using cgi, to give a web interface? most people are familiar
>>with this, it's easy enough to write, and perl is a good language for
>>scripting command line tools like cdrecord.
>>
>>also, the interface could then be made available on other machines - you
>>could just copy an iso to the right directory on the shared fileserver, put
>>a disk in the burner machine, then open the web page, choose which iso to
>>burn, press a button and it would start cdrecord. The output could be shown
>>by making part of the page a subframe with a 5 second page refresh on it.
> 
> 
> The thing is we are only planning to have one burner, we need some way of 
> easily allowing users to work out whom has control of the device. If two 
> people go to burn a CD at approximately the same time, with access to the 
> burning process from each desktop, how do we ensure that the correct data is 
> burnt to the CD and is taken home by the correct person. Thus I much prefer 
> the plan to have a vertical app installed on a single machine. 
> 
> We haven't really sorted out user login procedure satisfactorily. Therefore I 
> think it would be wise to only allow burning of predefined ISOs in the first 
> instance.

Here! Here! Let's get the thing off the ground.

> 
> I feel we might need to do some [X,G,K]DM hacking to create a custom 
> login mechanism, which selects an unused guest account or allows users to 
> login with there known username and password.
> 

Why? If it's going to be a standalone, single user box, just log in as 
say 'cdburner'/'cdburner' with local .profile file set up as mentioned 
previously to start up X and the dedicated burner UI. The only other 
account needed apart from root is an admin account to take care of the 
ISO library.

This brings me back to my reference to a CD burner/DVD reader combo. Do 
we have an accessible DVD reader at the Folly? A lot of stuff is 
presented on DVD.


Ken Hough