[SOLVED] clients do not shutdown

[Matt Johnson]

>________________________________
> From: Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg at gmail.com>
>To: edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com 
>Sent: Thursday, 8 November 2012, 17:45
>Subject: Re: clients do not shutdown
> 
>Στις 08/11/2012 07:32 μμ, ο/η Matt Johnson έγραψε:
>> but from the command line:  'sudo poweroff -fp' works and 'sudo poweroff' does not.
>
>What does `sudo poweroff` do? Last messages on screen etc?
>
>> If i can manually hack a file somewhere to change poweroff to poweroff -fp that will be at least a temporary workaround.
>
>That's in the ldm sources, you'd need to recompile it:
>$ grep poweroff ldm-trunk/gtkgreet/greeter.c
>  G_CALLBACK(spawn_command), "/sbin/poweroff");
>
>Or you could make a /usr/share/ltsp/init-ltsp.d/50-poweroff wrapper,
>that moves poweroff to poweroff.original, and creates a shell file in
>/sbin/poweroff that calls poweroff -fp. But it'd be better to find a
>proper solution if "normal" shutdown doesn't work for you, so that
>nbd-server connections are closed, swap files on the server are cleaned
>up etc.


1. For info and completeness, I have worked around this hanging client shutdown issue by downloading the source for ldm, modifying it as suggested above, recompiling it to produce a .deb, then installing that .deb. I have notes on how to do that if anyone would like them - once you've done it once, it's trivial. (My notes are based on and taken from the following: http://linux.m2osw.com/howto-recompile-ubuntu-package )

As a result, 'shutdown' on the ldm greeter screen menu now sends '/sbin/shutdown -fp' instead of '/sbin/shutdown'. From a user's perspective, this solves the issue and shuts the client down immediately. I understand that there may be some disadvantages (not properly closing nbd-server connections), but this workaround is far superior to having to hold the button on the case in to shutdown hanging clients.

2. In addition, to disable shutdown on clients from the gnome / unity session itself (i.e. from the desktop indicator menu), I have also:

sudo ltsp-chroot
chmod -x /sbin/shutdown

This means a user can only shutdown from the ldm greeter after they have logged out. Clicking 'shutdown' from gnome / unity simply logs the user out instead. We are happy with that behaviour.

In summary, it's all working very well indeed. We have 250 users across 32 thin clients and 32 fat clients, printing to 10 network printers, using a variety of quality applications - it's all fast, reliable and easy to maintain.

Thanks to all have contributed to the ltsp / edubuntu projects as well as those upstream.

--
Matt