Multiple logins on same ID

[Tim]

Tim:

>> Why do that?  It sounds a recipe for disaster.  Perhaps if you mention
>> why it's too difficult to manage individual IDs per student, someone can
>> suggest an easy way of handling that for you.

Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन) wrote:

> I have a diskless cluster where all clients share the same root (/),
> mounted readonly over NFS. That works fine, and I've ironed out some
> minor hiccups. /home is RW.
> 
> The usage model is that kids don't regularly use the computers. There
> are far too many kids in a government school to effectively share four
> computers. But four is a start, and basic familiarisation is
> happening. Hence I can't manage one login per student. Besides,
> explaining what a password means to a kindergarten kid who doesn't
> even speak my language, is simply beyond me.

Sounds a good case for logging in using a barcode scanner against the
student's library card.  Gives you individual users, a simple logon
procedure, and something you can expand on over the years (more
computers, same students with same logons next year, etc.).

> What I've done is that on the server, I've asked GDM to login in user
> "user" automagically on boot up, and after timeout. To be honest I'm
> just lazy. I should do something where each client has it's own user,
> so that host1 logins in user1, and so on. But I was wondering if Gnome
> and other apps will let me live with a shared home. Guess they won't.

That is another simple option:  One user per machine, but not one user
for all machines.  It avoids two terminals trying to access the same
personal files at the same time, but doesn't get around the problem of
one user changing settings for the next user.  But there are probably
some "internet cafe" options for wiping out all customisations and
starting a new, each logout and login cycle.

> So any ways of making GDM log in different users on different
> terminals, other than dynamically generating gdm.conf on system
> startup for each terminal?

Possibly some integration between DHCP issued hostnames and usernames
derived from hostnames, for someone adventurous with scripting...  But
if you just have four terminals, you may as well take the simple way out
and have user1, user2, user3 & user4 preconfigured as the autologon
users for each terminal.  Diskless terminals can have different files
given to them as they bootup, they could share almost everything
(hardware configuration, etc.,) except for the files to do with
auto-logon.

Probably you want to look into some internet cafe solutions, there might
be something that suits you.

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