[Lancaster] Folly Terminals are go!

[Martyn Welch]

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Hi All,

An amazing amount of work seems to have been done in the last month or two.
The kitchen area looks far better and we now have a few working terminals! A
huge thanks to Ken and Andy.

We started to discuss a few things last night:

1) System Security

The system is working, but it wouldn't take someone with too much knowledge of
Linux to do some real damage. We need to improve security on the system,
especially the server.

- - The root password has _got_ to change to something far harder to guess

- - The number of packages (especially Desktop Environments) need to be reduced
so that the environment can be managed easily

- - Priviledges need to be set on account home directories

- - The clients need to have there BIOS passwords set and boot from floppy
disabled.


2) Mission critical kit

The server is now _very_ important. With out the server the terminals are
useless. Over time it might make sense to migrate some of the extra services
of it onto another/other boxes, to reduce the work of rebuilding one of the
boxes if it fails.

I think we need to have separate storage for the terminal equipment, for when
the room is needed for other things. This I suppose includes setting aside a
set of nice (pref. identical) keyboards and mice for use with the terminals.
Getting them running after not being used should be very easy and setting
aside clean nice keyboards will make the setup look far more inticing.


3) User accounts

We need ideas. The best we could think of last night is a set of guest logins,
one for each of the terminals & the posiblity of creating separate logins for
advanced/ frequent users (giving them private data storage). Am I right in
thinking there will be problems with 2 sessions logging in as the same user
simultaneously?


4) Publicity

It would be nice to get the room in use and also to publicise the LUG, Linux
and more generally open source software.

It was felt that it would be nice to get hold of a CD burner and a stack of
cheapish CDs for the folly and burn copies of Knoppix [www.knoppix.net/],
Gnuwin [http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html] and possibly a very friendly
distro or two, either for free or a very minimal fee (£1/50p?)

There is now a large screen in the kitchen space, a scrolling presentation
with info about the use of the space and availibility of services would be
nice!

Posters?


5) LUG Organisation

It would be nice to setup one of the spare machines as a LUG server, with a
(passworded) WIKI on it for storing configuration info on it and other LUG
related matters.

We also need to decide how we are going to carry this LUG forward now.


I think that'll do for now,

Martyn

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

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