administration

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi Jake,

On Fri, 06 Oct 2006, Jake Redekop wrote:

> I have a thin client network up and running and am now tasked with the job 
> of locking it down.  

By "locking it down", do you mean secure it?

> I'd like to "reset" the clients each night at shut down or start up and
> was wondering what would be the best way to do this.  I suspect I'd use a
> cron job, but what I'd actually have to do to acheive this I'm a little
> unsure about.  Is all that I'd have to do is backup and restore the i386
> directory?  Any advice would be appreciated.

Why would you need to do this?  When a thin client reboots it _is_ reset
completely back to a zero state.  /opt/ltsp/i386/ is entirely read-only to
the thin clients.

If you want to shutdown or reboot the thin clients every night, you can use
a cron job to do this, yes.  If you open /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/crontab ob the
server and add a line:

00 22    * * *   root    shutdown -h now

cron should halt the machine at 10pm every night.  You can change -h to -r
to reboot if you prefer. I'm assuming cron actually runs on the thin
clients -- I'm not totally certain of this.

Alternatively, if ltsp-utils works on edubuntu thin clients, the server can
send a message to the thin client to shutdown:

	http://www.skolelinux.no/~klaus/sarge/x2700.html#AEN2845

but I'm not certain if edubuntu's ltsp currently supports this.  Oliver
might be able to comment.

Gavin