[380] in athena10
Re: Larvnet design discussion
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Aug 5 15:52:38 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0808051517420.21810@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:51:53 -0400
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On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 15:47 -0400, Timothy G Abbott wrote:
> I might consider trying an /etc/X11/Xsession.d script rather than using
> PAM, if you just want a little script to run whenever someone logs in
> graphically. It sounds like liblarv is trivial enough it could be done
> with a script, rather than a C program, and might be easier to maintain.
It could be done with nc and touch/rm, but Xsession.d scripts run as the
user, so they can't touch a flag file owned by root in a global
location. (The flag file could be user-owned and moved to /tmp, but
then the user can remove the flag file during the login session, the tmp
cleaner can eliminate it, you have corner cases where some other user
owns the flag file, and so forth; it's just not as robust.)
Xsession.d also doesn't make it trivial to run stuff at logout. You
have to wrap the login session, which is extra machinery.
> Either way, I'd have the larvnet system check whether the machine was a
> cluster machine before doing anything (to avoid annoying people with
> strong privacy who use non-cluster workstations) and which thus can be
> included in the default debathena-pam-config /etc/pam.d/gdm file.
Current thinking is that all debathena-cluster machines are cluster
machines, so there's no such thing as "check if this machine is a
cluster machine". If you want a private workstation, you install
debathena-workstation. If you really want a piece of cluster machine
functionality like the tmp cleaner, you install that package by hand.
