Multiseat Support in HAL

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 14:37 +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> in ubuntu ltsp (and in ltsp5 even upstream since we merge the projects
> now) we use ssh with an attached communication socket on the client
> instead of insecure xdmcp. all commands executed through that socket are
> run with privileges of the user who owns the ssh tunnel. so if udev
> recognizes a new block device, it issues an ltspfs (fuse based) mount
> command through that socket in the users session on the server which
> then mounts the device from the client. 

While this probably works great for mounting an already formatted USB
keyfob device (ie. 99% of all work loads) it's probably not going to
work for

 - LUKS encrypted usb keys
 - partitioning / formatting usb keys

or maybe I don't know enough about ltspfs / LTSP in general.

Just a heads up that we'll be starting offering partitioning /
formatting methods in HAL in the near future. I'm also working on some
GNOME disk utility thing

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-2.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-3.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-4.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-5.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-6.png

and I know from Kevin Ottens that similar things are planned for KDE.

It strikes me as being a better solution to just carry the USB traffic
over the network and channel that data into a dedicated kernel space USB
host device driver. I believe Sun Ray works that way, I'm sure Artem can
confirm / deny this. Though, from what I hear doing isosynchronous USB
transfers over Ethernet is pretty wacky since their are timing
requirements. I don't really pretend to know :-)

Also, using a USB approach would enable support for other devices and
it'd fit a lot better into the ConsoleKit approach I've sketched out in
the other mail. Then again, a) I don't know a lot about LTSP; and b) I'm
not convinced the ConsoleKit idea is good (mostly I think it's too
complex). 

Btw, I certainly don't hope this comes across as a flame. Mostly I'm
just curious.

    David