[Lancaster] folly machines.

[Andy Baxter]

On Wednesday 12 May 2004 12:06, Martyn Welch wrote:
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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.

agreed. The 3 tiny machines we have are looking good. Would be nice to get a 
compaq monitor for the third.

> 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.

It's been moved upstairs - I agree it's not the best thing to have it used as 
a workstation, though maybe not the end of the world if it has to be.

> 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.

The way we had it before, with named accounts for each xterm, worked OK I 
think. It would be better if xdmcp could somehow know which machine was 
logging on, and only include that machine's account plus any personal 
accounts. May not be possible though.

I'm not sure exactly why having all the users the same would cause a problem, 
except that I've heard it does for some apps like Open Office. The trouble 
with having separate machine accounts is if people want to save stuff and 
then come back and work on a different machine. One way would be to say if 
you want to do this, you need a personal account; another would be to provide 
a shared directory under each /home/username/share.

> 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.

Not sure - had a quick look and it looks /very/ restrictive:

"The user should not be able to open an interactive shell (Terminal), or run 
arbitrary commands, 

The user should not have a view to the filesystem, so no filemanager, 

The user should not be able to modify or create files directly by means 
provided by KDE (no editor, menuedit, etc.)."

Would be good for setting up a web-browsing only account, but not much else I 
think.

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

That's one of my favourite occupations - but I have got to thinking there are 
better ways to spend my time.

> 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.

agree on all these - this has been a lot of the problem before I think, that 
having taken it all apart, it takes too much time to put them all back 
together the right way

> 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.

I was thinking have two other boxes apart from the X server and the terminals. 
One is a file, web and ftp server, to keep any data that needs to be 
preserved between sessions (except maybe some scratch space on the X server 
which files are deleted from on a first in first out basis) If someone gets a 
personal account, they can have ftp access from home or another machine, and 
maybe also some low bandwidth public webspace on a /~username/... scheme? 
This goes in the cupboard or upstairs.

The other is a 'device server', which has removable media, plus maybe a decent 
sound card and video record/playback card if we can get one. This could be 
used for things like playing streaming audio/video in the room (there's a big 
tv set in there already, and we should be able to find a small hi fi with 
line in I reckon). This would be left out, so people can reach the 
connectors, but with no monitor or keyboard (so anyone can reach it without 
moving anyone off an x terminal.)

This is just an idea - I don't know if this would be the best way of splitting 
things up - just thinking on the basis of putting similar things together and 
taking as much load as possible off the x server.

I'm thinking of going in on Saturday to do some more work on it - maybe see 
people then if you want to come. What I'm hoping to do is just get the 
xserver up and running with the terminals, and leave the rest until we've had 
a chance to talk at the next meeting.

> 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)
>
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Thanks, andy.