[K12OSN] library kiosks

[Shahms King]

On Tue, 2004-05-18 at 13:40, Tim Litwiller wrote:
> I want to setup several logins for a public area of the library.
> I would like these to autologon to an account that opens a browser to 
> the card catalog web page.
> I would also like the machine to log off and then back in if the browser 
> window is closed.
> 
> Has anyone done something like this?  What would be the scurity issues I 
> need to worry about?

A number of people have similar setups for various purposes.  What's
involved depends a lot on what requirements you have beyond those stated
above.  Assuming access on the terminals is restricted to the browser
*only* (no other logins, no other applications, etc.) there are still a
number of ways of accomplishing this.  There more requirements you add,
the fewer the options.  But to get that basic functionality you can:

1) Configure GDM to run something other than '/usr/bin/gdmlogin' for
remote clients.  That "something" can take care of launching and
configuring the browser window, etc.

2) Configure GDM to use TimedLogin with a very short delay
(AutomaticLogin doesn't work on remote displays for security reasons)
and make sure the default session does what you want.

3) Add a SCREEN_01 = kiosk in the /etc/ltsp.conf and put a kiosk script
in /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/screen.d that starts X and uses ssh to run the
appropriate script on the LTSP server, etc.

There are more options, some better than others.  Note that none of the
options listed above will work very well (if at all) if you want the
users to have access to all of GNOME or KDE as neither of them respond
very well to the same user running multiple sessions...
-- 
Shahms King <shahms at shahms.com>