I'm having a little problem and it's DOING MY NUT ...

I maintain a school network of Slack (current), KDE 4.22.
I need to be able to logoff all PC's at a certain time.

I set up SSHd with no root password authenticated to the server, so I can auto login to each workstation and exec commands.

KDE 4 can be logged off via the dbus-send command. This will only execute as the current user. I tried exporting the dbus session but it didn't work. Then I used who | cut etc to grab the user name and su'do'd the dbus command. This worked.

Phew I thought. Cracked it.

Except if a unsaved document is open it will ask the user what they want to do and they can cancel the logoff. ARGHHHHHHHH.

So how can I terminate/destroy/force logoff the X/KDE session, putting it back to KDM?

Your advice will be mucho appreciated

Andrew

um do you think thats wise?

as for your other problem, i guess you could kill the window manager completely,but that would suck for the people actually using the pc's at the time.

Regarding SSH, it's authenticated (certs) in a secure envir so no problem.

Yes I have to terminate the session if they haven't logged off. I'm using Wall to issue reminders every minute then at 5 it should terminate.

So how do I terminate the KDE session and go back to KDM without any errors? If I terminate X then KDM fails as well.

Andrew

Well, if you have given your users adequate warning that the system is going down in 5,4,3,2,1 minutes, the sure-fire way to stop KDE3 is /etc/init.d/kdm stop as root. Users will loose data if they have "unsaved documents" and the like.

Then they'll only be left with a terminal login. Maybe you'll want to disable terminal logins as well?

To start KDE up again, as root, do /etc/init.d/kdm start

As I said, the above is for KDE3, I expect it's much the same for KDE4.

Do you know what the equivalent is for Slackware?

I'm close now, I do "killall kdm" and that works nicely, though I'd prefer to terminate properly if there is a way.

Slack is just another distro like the rest (ducks!) so most startup / shutdown scripts should be the same or very similar (eg maybe a different path to the equivalent executable).

There should be something in /etc/init.d/* that refers to the KDM

Doesn't /etc/init.d/kdm stop work?

What happens if you issue that command (and I am not sure that it is at all "nice", but you warned your users about an imminent shutdown. Yes?)

Slackware has init scripts in /etc/rc.d, closest I can find is rc.4 (runlevel 4) which exec's KDM, but there is no stop command.

I did try "KDM stop" as root and nothing happened / no error/output.

It may seem strange, but I get hung up on "doing things properly" too. Really what you are doing is wasting your time. killall kdm works fine, you might want to follow with a -9 if it doesn't die. Your task is to kill kde. Using kill to kill kde is a very appropriate solution.

I think you mean "I did try /etc/init.d/kdm stop" which is different.
Then it worked

No, in slackware "kdm stop" doesn't do anything. Also, there is nothing in /etc/init.d as slackware doesn't use Fedora style init scripts.

I'm happy with "killall kdm" then.