[K12OSN] Introduction and questions

Mike Ely mely at rogueriver.k12.or.us
Sun Dec 4 06:02:04 UTC 2005


Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 22:26, Mike Ely wrote:
>> My current 
>> environment is fairly straightforward: we have a Samba 3 domain for 
>> 'doze clients, not nearly enough Macs, and for this particular server, 
>> all the student users will be logging in with the same domain account. 
>> This presents a potential difficulty with regard to Firefox and also 
>> with OpenOffice, as my recollection was that both of those applications 
>> really didn't much like being launched more than once by a given user.
> 
> That seems like a particularly bad idea since anyone will be able
> to delete everyone else's saved work, aside from the problems
> you mention.  But if you can't set up individual logins, how
> about having each workstation auto-login with its own account
> to avoid conflicts with running programs that expect to have
> unique files in their $HOME directory?
> 

For starters, that will probably work, and I intend to create student 
accounts as soon as time allows, but in general I really prefer that any 
computer can access any set of files, as my experience has been that 
assigning students to computers creates sometimes-unsurmountable hassles 
when the lab is over-full, a machine breaks down, or teachers decide to 
move the kids around for student management reasons.

I've got a little bit of time - the lab is going to be exclusively used 
to run Firefox for state online testing for a few weeks, and I'll make 
it clear that document saving will be unreliable during that time period.

Once student accounts are setup, I will rewrite my old "slayer" 
initscript that scans for sessions owned by generic student accounts 
every ten seconds and runs "slay" on them if it finds any.  Very 
lightweight shellscript that does a fine job.

Cheers,
Mike

PS: Does anyone else think that "running programs that expect to have 
unique files in their $HOME directory" is an example of developer 
sloppiness?  I can see the use for it in, say, a mail client, but a word 
proccessor?  Web browser?  Please!  fork(), tee, etc. (not to mention if 
loops), are there for a reason!




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