From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Dec 20 0:21:47 2000 From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Dec 20 00:21:45 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from jason.argos.org (a13b063.neo.rr.com [204.210.197.63]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A4CFD37B400 for ; Wed, 20 Dec 2000 00:21:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (mike@localhost) by jason.argos.org (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id eBK8Fej00643 for ; Wed, 20 Dec 2000 03:15:40 -0500 Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 03:15:40 -0500 (EST) From: Mike Nowlin To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: keeping lots of systems all the same... Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I recently made the decision to upgrade all of our net-booted X terminals to full-blown workstations. (Basically, adding a hard drive and some memory.) Having 19 people running Netscape remotely on our Alpha is sucking up a gig of RAM and almost two gigs of swap, not to mention the "normal" things the Alpha has to do... After fighting off (quite violently, I might add) the top-level management who wanted to "just give everyone a Windows 98 machine - I never have any problems with mine at home...!", I came up with the following: -- Celeron 700-ish, 100Mb FXP, 20G, 64 or 128M, S3 or ATI Rage video -- NIS for uname/passwd auth - any user can use any machine -- /home mounted via NFS off a master file server for the users' files -- everything else (with whatever exceptions I find) on the local HD. -- (suggestions???) The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice, Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet. I'm planning on building a fairly big machine to do world builds on to keep these machines (30-ish) all synced to the same OS version, probably with weekly installworlds on them. Questions --------- Handling the OS updates is pretty easy... Is there any equally easy way to keep a particular set of ports updated automatically? I'd like to avoid having to do a "make deinstall; make install" all the time... For security reasons, is there a good package out there that can reliably determine when an X session has become idle for a period of time (no mouse/keyboard activity) and "nicely" log that session out? (Assuming programs that "nicely" handle KILLs...) Is there a program out there that can trigger my holodeck to create a solid-matter hand that can come out of the cooling vents and beat the hell out of any user who tries to hit the power switch? :) --mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message