Re: guest account and kerberos

Hi Dashamir and thanks for you reply,

I think I didn't explained properly the situation: my "clients" are not LTSP clients but Debian-Edu workstations (installed with "workstation" profile). I need a (possibly passwordless) account with the same name working on every workstation of the lab.

It couldn't be a regular "student" account made with Gosa2 because in that way if many people logged in at the same time with that account they couldn't use multiple instances of chromium browser or other software.

(and that is exactly the situation that I expect when we have national online exams)

So I simply made on every workstation a user with the same name "guest" with these commands:

adduser guest

passwd -d

I was afraid that an account made in that way could create conflicts with the administration of the users created centrally with Gosa2. At the moment I didn't noticed any, but it wouldn't be nice if they come up during the national exams... 😉

Thanks for the links you sent me, in particular I think I'll use part of your script for resetting guest account on every login!

Bye,

Il giorno sab 18 mar 2023 alle ore 10:31 Dashamir Hoxha <dashohoxha@gmail.com> ha scritto:

On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 5:41 PM Lorenzo Ceriani <lceriani73@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I am very happy of our new Debian-edu computer lab, everything is running smooth even if the machine are old enough.
I have just some help requests:
1. I need a passwordless guest account on every client which erase all data on every login or logout (useful for doing national online exams) For the moment i created a local account with the same name on every client with adduser *** and then passwd -d ***.
Still to do the erasing part, but for the moment it seems ok. Can this create problems with debian-edu?

It is not clear how you create those local accounts, so cannot say whether they create any problem.

There is nothing in the debian-edu docs about guest accounts (yet).
However, debian-edu is based on the LTSP project, and there are some blogs/discussions about guest accounts here and there. For example:
- http://www.m-opensolutions.com/ltsp-guest-accounts-and-mate-desktop-setup/
- https://dashohoxha.fs.al/ltsp-scenarios/#org3535561
- https://github.com/ltsp/ltsp/discussions/298

I have also used guest accounts in another similar context:
- https://gitlab.com/docker-scripts/debian-desktop/-/blob/main/inject/setup-user-accounts.sh#L84

Maybe these can give some hints about how to develop your own solution.
If you find a suitable solution, please let us know how you did it.

Regards,
Dashamir

2. I would like to avoid that (kerberos?) dialog box that ofteh/always asks for a password after login. It confounds pupils... :-)
Thanks in advance for your advice!
L.