Re: [9fans] making yourself at home

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

>> reboot.
>
> Ok, but it just sounds strange for someone who has only been using
> Unix-like systems for the last 10 years.
>
Strange, but harmless.  More practical and trustowrthy than Windows'
Ctrl-Alt-Del.

> Ok, so a terminal is really a single-user "terminal", unlike a
> "workstation".
>
You can see the additional security in that, can't you?

> Hmmm, ... I'm used to say that a machine should only be powered on
> once and that you should login only once ... so rebooting is not an
> option.
>
Things change...  Note that in Plan 9 terminals and their users are
not tightly coupled.  None of the terminals ought to be customised to
a user's requirements or, putting it a different way, all of them are.
So "logging off" leaves the terminal where someone else can make use
of it.  Windows has a complex system to provide this type of "roaming
profile" and it's a nightmare, Plan 9 has it built in right at the
grass-root level and it works faultlessy.

> The long term plan would be to setup an auth-, a CPU- and a
> file-server and to use thin clients as terminals. However, I don't
> know yet (a) if the AMD Geode based thin clients I have are supported
> and (b) how to configure the server(s) to let them boot via PXE.
>
I think Ron Minnich has done a lot of work with the Geode, he may be
able to guide you there.

> I'll start with the setup of an auth/CPU/fileserver and then a thin
> client to see how all of this works.
>
That would be my choice, too, except I chose to run AUTH separately a
long time ago and I still am not sure that it wasn't overkill.  I
regret believing that AUTH can run on a 386: it does, but it's not
wise, every time you run AWK on a machine without floating point
hardware you crash it.  That gets irritating.

++L