Gentoo is a Computer Lab-Monitoring and Control?

ckroon · n00b Joined: 29 May 2009 Posts: 1

Hi All...

At the school I teach we are moving to Linux in our computer labs.

We are dipping our foot into the Linux world so to speak.

Is it possible to have it set up so that a teacher can monitor the students usage and lock out specific computers?

In a perfect world we would be able to send out a message: This computer will log out in 1 minute..... then have it do so.

We have a problem with kids staying in the lab after the bell rings..

Any ideas/ suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

We would also like to be able to view what is on a students screen at any given time...

Thanks a lot!

SZwarts · Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 1:36 am Post subject:

You can use x11vnc on the host (student's computer) and vncviewer on the client (caretaker's computer) to see what is going on on a computer, assuming you have the login for that computer.

If you want to login and Display a message, there are several options, for example if you have kde running, you can login
and do

DISPLAY=:0 kdialog --msgbox "This computer will be shut down in 1 minute" &
sleep 80;shutdown -h now

_________________
only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars

bejayel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Nov 2007 Posts: 104

You can also command line reboot it via SSH.

You should should also study how to edit their priviliges to prevent them from using certain commands. For instance, you would absolutely NOT want a student using SUDO or SU. You may also want to take a good look into NIS and NFS.

You know what:

http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/

Give that a good once over (Then book mark it and use it for reference) to get moderate idea for creating/managing a network the size that your's probably will be. They may not be gentoo specific tutorials, but everything in them should mostly work. You may have to google the locations of specific configuration file locations on gentoo (or whatever your choice distro is).

SZwarts · Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 2:08 am Post subject:

bejayel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Nov 2007 Posts: 104

just in case his password is killer or 1234567 or something

!

Seriously though, for security purposes i would simply disable such abilities. No they probably wont get your password, but they could.