Feels so good to be back...bunch of Epoptes questions

[Alkis Georgopoulos]

Στις 12-12-2011, ημέρα Δευ, και ώρα 16:42 -0500, ο/η David Trask έγραψε:
> 1. It seems every now and then Epoptes won't see anything...I find if
> I log out on the master Epoptes machine and log back in....then it
> will see things again.  Is this normal?  And if so, is there an easier
> way to kill everything without logging out?  I tried "killall
> epoptes", but there was nothing to do.

No, it's not normal. Also logging off + back in shouldn't affect the
clients that the epoptes GUI sees, so what you're saying is very weird.
It might be a collision with some other program you're running.
I'd like to have a look at this if you happen to be online in IRC when
you have that problem.


> 2. Is there a way to group the clients by "classroom" similar to
> iTalc?  This would make it easier in a lab setting when you want to
> execute commands, reboot, shutdown....etc.

Planned for the next release, due in a couple of weeks.


> 3. In Epoptes, I can get the machines to restart, log out, shutdown,
> lock screens...but I cannot do any screen sharing/demo'ing....what am
> I missing?

There are toolbar buttons for this, or menus, e.g.
Clients → Broadcasts → (Monitor student, Assist student, Broadcast
teacher) etc.
If you're having problems, start epoptes from a gnome-terminal, so that
you can see its error messages, or check your ~/.xsession-errors.
E.g. you may have something listening in port 5500, the port used for
reverse VNC connections.


> 4. One thing the Resara guys made it easy to do was set "autologin".

Planned for some future version. The key point here is that the teacher
shouldn't have to know the student passwords. So LDM_AUTOLOGIN /
LDM_USERNAME / LDM_PASSWORD can't be used cleanly, we need to do it some
other way, e.g. with the PAM one-time-passwords module or with the
lightdm configuration files.


> 5. Another thing Resara allowed me to do was to assign printers to
> certain groups of thin-clients.

We don't have any plans in epoptes for printer management right now, but
well written patches are always welcome.