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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePoettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePosted May 2, 2012 16:18 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)Parent article: Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature
Seriously useful stuff for environments with large numbers of users, like university computer labs (if those still exist). It does require the control groups stuff to be pretty bulletproof to make sure that one user can't unduly slow down or crash another user's session. I expect that in future versions of Fedora we will see more work towards making the system multiuser-safe by default.
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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 2, 2012 16:36 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> I expect that in future versions of Fedora we will see more work towards making the system multiuser-safe by default.
Maybe. I suppose it depends on how popular it gets.
What is going to be interesting is that while it probably works now, will it still work well when Fedora 20 comes out?
We have seen multiseat efforts in the past, but they never quite come to fruition and bit-rot on vine. So they lose what usefulness they may have had at some point. If the new 'tight integration' approach using things systemd/udev/consolekit/cgroups/etc works out well enough that it stays useful for a long them then that will go a long way to prove that this design approach is the correct one.
If they are not able to maintain it and it breaks after a couple Fedora releases then it's not going to be much better then we had before were things worked well if you could manage to figure out how to configure things correct and it requires significant effort to keep customized setups working well between major version.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 0:14 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] We have seen multiseat efforts in the past, but they never quite come to fruition and bit-rot on vine. Speaking as the author of one of them (Ubuntu's multiseat package), the primary reason is that they were pretty much all spectacular hacks. Some less so than others (Ubuntu's was the cleanest of them all at the time - most others required a very unpleasantly patched server whereas we did it out of the box), but most of them were very difficult to support in the long term, especially since we were fighting against the underlying system rather than working with it. The other, perhaps less important, reason is that pretty much all the efforts I know of were either done for specific projects (like the Brazilian one) with perhaps a limited lifespan, or were commercial imperatives to support certain product lines, again with a limited lifespan. I'm a lot more optimistic about the systemd stuff than I was about any of the others.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 2, 2012 23:10 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] like university computer labs... Uni computing labs are a size up from where this is useful, they have 40 to 400 computers whereas multi-head is more useful for 4. The length limitations of USB cabling means you can't cheaply move expensive and privacy-sensitive hardware out of the computing lab and into a secure space. The cheapest ethernet-using robust computers are small form factor PCs, with a trend to have no unreliable rotating storage but using cheap CF cards. They are usually configured as stateless or puppet-maintained computers. Once they get graphics card sharing going then you might want to connect multiple screens and keyboards to those lab computers.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 0:24 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
> Uni computing labs are a size up from where this is useful, they have 40 to 400 computers whereas multi-head is more useful for 4.
You can still use multi-head to have four monitors/keyboards/mice per physical box, reducing your lab from 40-400 systems to 10-100 systems.
Also, USB-over-Ethernet extenders exist, and you could use those to run a whole lab from a small handful of servers. Many computer labs already use semi-thin clients (where you SSH elsewhere if you want a pile of computing power), and this seems like a natural extension.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 13:28 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Not to also mention that off the shelf consumer hardware is significantly cheaper and more powerful then what you typically see with thin client hardware. So even if you are just provisioning for thin clients or 'semi-thin clients' you can still come out ahead.
However, The type of VGA/keyboard/mouse clients were you have a small box you connect to a desktop/desktop server type thing over long twisted wire pairs do have a significant advantage that they are mostly tamper proof and are useless to the thief if stolen.
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