Getting thin clients users to show up on 'who'?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

I just discovered a way that will solve a long standing problem with
LTSP in Debian Edu.  The problem is simply that none of the users
logged in from a thin client show up as logged in on the thin client
server.  The reason is how SSH works, by default not updating
/var/run/utmp when ssh is used to run a command remotely (as in 'ssh
somehost command').  This can be changed by forcing ssh to allocate a
tty using -t.

To demonstrate:

  % ssh user.skolelinux.no who|grep pere
  %ssh -t user.skolelinux.no who|grep pere
  Connection to user.skolelinux.no closed.
  pere     pts/6        2008-06-05 15:29 (88.131.81.122)
  %

I have yet to test this on a thin client, but suspect all we need to
do is to change the ssh call in ldm to add -t.

JFYI.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen