Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 22:44:35 -0500 (EST) From: "Jasper O'Malley" <jooji@nickelkid.com> To: Conrad Sabatier <conrads@home.com> Cc: hal Lynch <hal@sticky.usu.edu>, FreeBSDQuestions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Diskless (kiosk) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0001242233150.53754-100000@cornflake.nickelkid.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.000121204335.conrads@home.com>
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On Fri, 21 Jan 2000, Conrad Sabatier wrote: > On 21-Jan-00 hal Lynch wrote: > > > > If this is do-able using FreeBSD where can I look for some hints > > on how I might proceed? > > > > What haven't I thought of that I should? > > Netscape needs to write to a directory *somewhere*, even (I think) > with cacheing disabled. You're going to have to have something writeable. > Perhaps MFS would do the trick. The newer IBM Network Stations (models 2200 and 2800) running in kiosk mode do exactly what you're looking to do. They run a heavily customized version of NetBSD, booted off a flash card with a read-only root filesystem on the card, and with an MFS /tmp filesystem, in which the kiosk user has its writable home directory. The thing boots into X out of an endless loop in the startup scripts and runs whatever application(s) you've configured it to. If it's configured to run Netscape, it does that, and if Netscape is closed, the loop in the startup script just restarts X and Netscape. It should be fairly easy to reproduce on a diskless PC with FreeBSD and a live filesystem burned onto a CD, but you'll want to strip out a ton of potentially dangerous crap from that filesystem if you're just looking to run Netscape with a minimum of places for imaginative students to wander into. The IBM Network Stations don't even have chmod on the filesystem :P You'll also want to make /var a symlink to somewhere in that /tmp filesystem, as well. Cheers, Mick To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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