Following the installation of Italc on our LTSP Server, users reported that they had several green icons in their system tray. This transpired to be the KDE session manager, which automatically restores all applications running at time of logging-off. I have updated my Install Italc instructions to include excluding ica from KDE session manager.

In trying to kill off the multiple ica processes, I found that ps can do more than just ps aux. I found that ps -fHu username would provide a tree-view of the specified user, which is much neater than piping ps through grep.

And then our /tmp filesystem filled up, and I just simply could not work out why. Until, at least, I managed to trash our virtualised Windows Server 2003 (running under Qemu), by inadvertently disabling its network card and thus triggering the server monitoring - which automatically killed and restarted it; 600mb freed up in a second.

This turned out to be a complete nightmare, and took several days to resolve. I never did manage to get x11vnc working on the client, nor did I manage to get italc (which I think also uses x11vnc) working on the client. In the end I settled for installing italc-client on the server, so that the client runs when users log onto the server, allocating each user a unique port, and putting a little green italc icon in their system tray.

This required upgrading qt4 from lenny (hardly ideal) and still works like a pig. Well viewing is fine, but the remote control is unusably slow.

I found it impossible to manage the list of users in italc; which changes according to the whims of DHCP. I ended up writing a script to use the output of “who” to populate the globalconfig.xml file in /home/username/.italc; if I have time I will add the script to my install italc instructions.

Something that we have become used to having under Citrix is the ability to shadow users, and I have been missing this since our forays into LTSP. I know it is possible, and I have been attempting to use the KDE built-in Krfb Desktop Sharing module. The problem with this has been that, all users being on the same hardware, it’s difficult to know to which screen number to connect. I guess there probably is a way, but when I used trial and error to find the right display, the performance was less than impressive.

So I decided to follow the masses and install x11vnc on the client, but suffice don’t have it working yet!

You may recall my recent installation of Edubuntu at home. Well I was surprised to find that the Thin Client Manager, AKA the Student Control Panel, missing. I Googled without joy, and ended up finding that thin-client-manager-gnome needed to be installed via Synaptic. I reported this at #edubuntu and ogra informed that they have replaced this with iTalc. I therefore removed thin-client-manager-gnome, but again I could not find any reference to iTalc in the menus. Again I Googled fruitlessly and again the solution was as simple as installing italc-master (the client was already installed). And it worked, straight off including screen shadowing.

Now all I need to do is to work out how to install iTalc on Etch! Perhaps not. At least not just yet.