[Lancaster] Fwd: Re: installing the web server

[Martyn Welch]

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- ------ Original message ------
On Friday 11 Jun 2004 07:38, Martyn Welch wrote:

> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
>
> Subject: Re: installing the web server
> Date: Thursday 10 June 2004 19:22
> From: "andy baxter" <skullcap23 at hotmail.com>
> To: welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk
>
> could you copy this to the list? - my smtp sending is still down.
>

No Problem :)

> Went in today to set up the guest-config thing we talked about. I.e. there
> is an account called guest-config which is an image of how all the guest
> accounts should be set up when someone first logs in. I put a script in
> /etc/X11/xinit.d (called from the Xsession script) which checks to see if
> it's a guest account, and if it is, deletes all the contents of the home
> directory, then copies it from /home/guest-config.
>
> /home/guest-config is set up with a Desktop folder which becomes the guest
> account's Desktop. This has a link in it to a file
> /home/guest-config/help.txt, which we can put any user help info into. The
> Desktop dir is completely deleted and recreated whenever someone logs in,
> so the Desktop will always start off looking how we've set it up, and any
> files saved there will be deleted at the start of the next session.
>

It might be am idea to now place some nice large icons on the desktop for 
"surf the internet", "write a document", "draw a picture", etc. I did this on 
my gran's and sister's PCs which made life easy for them.

Since we now have a wiki up and running, could you please start a "Folly 
Configuration" Section where we can add _all_ information about changes that 
were made to stock installs so that it will be easier to re-create them after 
HD failures, reinstalls, etc. Maybe a section for each of the computer types, 
i.e. terminals, x-server, the lug server its self.

Also a section on the topology of the network would be useful for working out 
optimisations/trouble shooting.

> The Documents folder is a symlink to /home/guest-shared/Documents, which is
> set chmod g+s and chown guest-config:guest, so that any new files created
> there are owned by user guest and can be read by all the guest accounts.
> I.e. if someone saves a file in Documents, it will stay between sessions,
> in case someone wants to carry on with something they were doing the next
> day.
>

Have a look at the umask command, it's usually run as part of /etc/bashrc 
which sets default permissions for files. By creating a "guest" group and 
setting the group permissions a little bit more relaxed for these accounts 
than usual, the files will be able to be read and written regardless of which 
guest account they were first created under.

> I also put a script in /etc/cron.hourly which removes any files in
> /home/guest-shared/Documents which are more than a month old, and sets the
> permissions on all the files in it to g+rw. This is a bit of a dirty hack -
> really it should just do the first of these and be in cron.daily, but the
> problem is the default file creation mask is set to 133, which means files
> written by guest1 are not group-writeable, and can't be written to by
> guest2. I.e. if someone saved some work and logged in the next day on
> another machine, they would have to copy their file to a new name to carry
> on working on it. If anyone knows how to set the default umask for only the
> guest users to 113, this would be a help.
>

Ok, next time I'll read the whole email first :)

Either do a CASE with $USERNAME in /etc/bashrc or reset the umask in 
$HOME/.bashrc

> I would still like to see if there is a simple way of having just one guest
> account which maps into one of several terminal-specific accounts after
> someone has logged in, but I'm not sure how to do this. I've tested the
> thing i posted before about using xrdb to get the terminal's hostname,
> which returns something like host-192.168.3.51.folly.co.uk, so in principle
> we could have a few guest accounts with names like guest-3-51 and
> guest-3-52, but I'm not sure how to switch to the new account in the
> Xsession script, or if this is a good idea anyhow (bearing in mind ken's
> comments about simplicity). It would be nice though if there could just be
> a single poster on the wall saying 'to use these computers, log in as
> guest, password guest, then see the help file on the desktop for more
> information"
>

How about a bit of xdm hacking, to get it to automatically grab the hostname 
and auto-login to an appropriate account?

No need for people to login then, which may pose a problem if we later want to 
provide individual logins...

Alternatively have xdm or equiv. accept "guest" as a login and assign first 
unused "guest-x" account?

Martyn

- -- 
Martyn Welch (welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk)

PGP Key : http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/~martyn/pgpkey.html
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