From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] making yourself at home Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:33:06 +0200 From: lucio@proxima.alt.za In-Reply-To: <20070612201251.GB30133@mercurius.galaxy> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7d903f28-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 >> 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