the rm is rather short no? as for the reinstall....

if you do that on your server it should not take all that long no? i am assuming (yes assumptions make an ass out of me i know) that your server is running a SCSI raid thus the wr times should be very fast, and i just dont see users putting 100m+ worth of data on that HD to make the process all that long.

few seconds top, nothing unreasonable i would think.

man i really love the power of *nix, its just so much more then M$ has ever been, or likely ever will be.

by the time M$ catches up to what linux is doing today linux will be an other decade ahead.

In our case the files are not on a server, but on individual PCs.
You're right though. The time to delete files shouldn't be much of an issue.

Also true, but we have a few patrons that might

Amen

Well, I was at a staff meeting this morning and my Library Director gave me the OK to start looking for some new internet PCs that will be running Linux

I think We'll probably be going with the scripts to erase and restore the public users Home directory after each reboot.

If anyone has any ideas to add, as always, they are welcome

gratz on getting the go-a-head. i look forward to hearing how it works out for you.

i will be wanting to set something like that up in a year or so at a public facility and this type of setting will be ideal for it.

only thing i could think of if you did not want to scrub it on a reboot, or did not want to reboot linux every time a new user gets on is to give ea user some kind of generic user/pw with their own home dir.

example:

you set up each box to have 100 users:

user1
p/w = whateveryouwant.


then on a nightly basis the system goes in and scrubs all of the home dir of any changes made that day. little more work, but also saves the EU time as if you have old hardware linux is not the fastest booting OS out there.

but then again, that is a M$ guy thinking, and not linux.

Hmm... hadn't thought of that one. I wonder if I could write a script that would asign the 'public' user a new home directory on each login. That way we'd only need one user name and pwd, but still keep each users files separate.

One advantage of that would be if a patron came back later on the same day and needed access to the files they were using earlier they would still be there.

We just bought new internet PCs a couple years ago, so they're reasonably fast. But you're right, having to wait for them to reboot could be annoying if we have other patrons waiting to use that computer.

Maybe we could have the clean-up script run when the public user logs in. That way when a patron is done using the computer all they would have to do is log out, which would be a lot faster than rebooting the computer.

It'd be more efficient to do the cleaning when a user logs out, rather than when a new user logs in, don't you think?

Remember .bash_logout
Just set it up with

rm -rf download/*

Bingo, temporary space cleared.


Say you set it up this way -- /home/user/download -- Have /home/user/download be the only writeable part in the home directory.

Users won't be able to change the .dotfiles for preferences, etc -- and only one directory to clean on logout. All users use the same name, would be one way to do it.

I'm not sure if any programs would object to not being able to write to their respective .conf files... But it's worth a shot.

--Shade

I've already tried turning off write access to the home directory. Gnome, KDE, and other programs that store their settings there don't take to kindly to that though

In fact, it seems that Gnome keeps some user settings (wallpaper in this case) some where other than the home directory...

I've been testing some scripts the delete the users home directory and replace it with a back-up from a tar file, but although everything else (files and sub directories created, etc.) seems to be restore to the way it was when I created the tar file, the changes to wallpaper are not reset!

Can anyone tell me where these settings are actually kept ?

I haven't read this whole thread, so forgive me if this isn't relevant.

Bill Ott of the Grand Rapids (MICH) Public Library uses open source extensively at the library and made an interesting presentation on Internet Station Manager to KLUG (Kalamazoo Linux Users Group) last year.