[luau] Liholiho Status

[Warren Togami]

Several days last week I spent at Liholiho further preparing the
software configuration for the school session beginning August 4th.  On
Thursday we figured enough of the atalkd config so the Linux server can
act as the school's central file server.  On Friday Ray Strode and I
spent several hours working on the default desktop application settings.

* Ray reworked the default Gnome desktop to make it look more like MacOS
with the menu at top.  It looks very streamlined and easier to use now.

* We attempted to force Mozilla to be locked into certain prefs using
lock_pref directives, but Mozilla refused to start when using the
additional config file despite all documentation online insisting that
it should work.  It might be a bug in Mozilla 1.4, or maybe we were
doing something wrong.  Still need to investigate this.

* OpenOffice could have better default preferences that are less
confusing to the users.

Other than the Mozilla problem which can be easily fixed for all user
profiles later, the only remaining thing that needs to be done is user
accounts for the students and teachers.  Peter, it would be far easier
to script creation of the users and groups when you know the class
assignments for the groups so you don't need to go through 300+ accounts
and set the correct groups manually.

The accounts work something like this:
1) Create user accounts for everyone, students and staff, each with the
default private group of the same name.
2) Create class groups, add a class group to each student.  This is
mainly for the purpose of easy identification later for scripted jobs
(like deleting the entire graduating class).  We'll figure this part out
later.
3) Add the teacher to each of the private student groups within that
teacher's class.  This along with proper umask permissions will allow
the teacher to read all files saved by their students, but students
cannot read another student's files.
4) Add Samba accounts associated to the teacher's Unix account for
teachers that use Windows.  There is a short script you can add to
Windows bootup to mount the public TRANSFER folder as drive T:, and
otherwise they need to type \\LINUX\USERNAME in order to access their
home directory on the Linux server.  Without using a domain or Windows
Scripting there is no easier way at the moment.  (And I know nothing
about Windows scripting at the moment.)

Currently the only thing I don't know how to do is set the umask for
files created from MacOS by AFP over TCP.

So Peter, whenever you can get me the complete lists of students and
their classes I can script account creation and the server should be
ready for students.

This is exciting...  Almost ready!

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com