Ticket #382 (closed defect: fixed)

Opened 15 years ago

Last modified 15 years ago

Quickstation login times are unacceptable

Reported by: jdreed Owned by:
Priority: blocker Milestone: Karmic Deploy (Canceled)
Component: login chroot Keywords:
Cc: Fixed in version:
Upstream bug:

Description

This is a separate issue from the fact that login chroots are slow. Quickstations are designed for short login sessions to quickly check mail or print documents. When it takes the better part of 1 minute (of your 10 minute session) to get a web browser, that's not good.

Our long term fix for this will end up being aufs or whatever we do to speed up login times in general. We need short term fixes, however, which we can deploy before we use up all public goodwill for Debathena.

Possible short term fixes:

1) Make quickstations closer to -workstation machines, and disable root access completely (i.e. No installing software).
2) Do something awesome with kiosk mode from gdm.

I think #1 is far less effort than #2, but that's just me. We should compare login times for -cluster and -workstation on similar hardware to verify that #1 will be an improvement.

Change History

comment:1 Changed 15 years ago by broder

  • Status changed from new to proposed

In r24057, r24058, and r24059, I changed reactivate to only put the user in a login snapshot if they're not on a quickstation, and cluster-login-config to only clear the root password on quickstations.

I also modified the su and sudo warnings to explain that you don't get root on quickstations.

I've uploaded the new packages to proposed, but this should undergo some fairly extensive testing. Things to try:

On a non-quickstation:

  1. Make sure you get put in a login chroot
  2. Make sure the Athena root password is set correctly
  3. Test running both su and sudo to make sure they output the correct lecture (it should talk about the sandbox)

On a quickstation:

  1. Make sure you're /not/ in a login chroot
  2. Make sure that su does not accept the Athena root password
  3. Test running both su and sudo to make sure they output the correct lecture (it should talk about finding a cluster if you need root)

comment:2 Changed 15 years ago by broder

I've verified that the cluster half of this works, so we just need to test it on a quickstation. I'm reinstalling cluster-test to see if I can test it there.

comment:3 Changed 15 years ago by broder

  • Status changed from proposed to closed
  • Resolution set to fixed

This was deployed last evening. Obviously we should revisit this when we magically summon an aufs configuration that has less of a performance hit.

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