[Lancaster] folly machines.

[Martyn Welch]

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Hi Guys,

Sorry I didn't manage to make it down on Tuesday, lots of work on at the 
moment and I suppose that has got to take precident.

My interpretation of what Taylor required seems consistent. My aim was to get 
all the Tiny boxes working, or at least PC's in the Tiny boxes. A set of 
uniform looking PC's is better than loads of random cases. Is the Dell box 
still downstairs? I was hoping this machine could be located in the office, 
permanently on (out of the way of fingers) if this box is turned off the rest 
won't work so it would be better if it is not directly used.

I'm kind of unsure of how we are going to provide log on, we don't want all 
the machines logging on as the same person (e.g. Guest), however the 
administration and usage problems of giving each person a separate account 
might want to be avoided unless limiting access is required.

For day to day use it might be worth researching KDE's Kiosk mode, pointed at 
a specific local website? Heard about it, know nowt about it. With separate 
accounts activated for people doing workshops etc.

It might be worth looking into the "Linux Terminal Server Project" since we 
are basically trying to replicate this. No point reinventing the wheel.

I think we need to make the machines as uniform and "plug and play" as humanly 
possible. We need to standardise on say 2 button serial mice, din keyboards 
and the compaq (or as close as possible) monitors we have. Floppy drives in 
the machines if we must to make the cases look OK, but no CDROMs in the base 
units. They need to resolve there name and IP address from DHCP. The Xserver 
needs to be setup to accept X broadcast requests, so they automatically find 
the server. These boxes need to work when they are hauled out of storage, a 
mouse, keyboard and screen attached and turned on. No fiddling.

I like the idea of providing a burner, but this could be a secondary "service" 
task. Maybe a box with a webserver which accepts files and can be told to 
burn once all the required files are uploaded - via a secured webform. This 
is a service, if it is switched off it won't kill the entire system and will 
bow out relatively smoothly.

What does everybody else think?

Martyn

- ------ Original message ------
On Tuesday 11 May 2004 18:22, Andy Baxter wrote:

Ken and I did a bit more work on the machines today - we now have three of
 the tiny machines with Xwindows running under SuSE, and working network
 cards. The network cards are the Realtek NE2000 clones. All on io=0x300,
 irq=10. All the machines are set up to halt on ctrl-alt-del. Thanks to Ken
 for having done most of the work on this.

I talked to Taylor about his ideas for the room, and he was saying maybe have
three machines set up permanently, running off the Dell X server, plus some
more in the cupboard to bring out for workshops etc., so at the moment I
reckon the priority is to work on getting the machines we have running
already configured as well as possible, rather than building or installing
any more.

Things that still need doing, if anyone has the time:

- - have a look at the X server machine, and get the terminals working with
this.
- - DHCP would be a good idea probably, especially if we want to be able to put
other machines in the room sometimes - atm they are on static IPs
192.168.0.51-53
- - maybe look at how user accounts and file storage are going to work, for
people who want their own accounts. Any suggestions?

There's another meeting coming up week after next, so maybe we could talk
 then about ideas for how to have the network set up. One possibility would
 be to have a machine without a monitor in that room as a file server,
 ideally with a CD burner in it (could mount this as a network block device,
 to be accessed from the Xserver), so people using the room have some way to
 write to removable media. It would also be good if there was a way to get
 files on and off this over the network, so people with home computers can
 move stuff to and fro.

andy.

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

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