Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
Hi, I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.). Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck etc.). I'd welcome any advice and suggestions about how to do this. Currently the information on the system is updated in situ so the file systems can't be made read only (any ideas on how we could split the updating from the deployment welcome). We also need to find a way of turning firefox into a kiosk browser. Regards, drseuk -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf-eu.org ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
El día Thursday, June 08, 2006 a las 11:16:15AM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] escribió: Hi, I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.). Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck etc.). ... I was once involved running one of our library application in so called 'library buses' which are connected via GPRS and Internet to the central library and the readers of the library could borrow books in the bus at dedicated stations of the tour. Borrowing and book return was made directly in the central database (just for background). The personal in the bus is a mix of driver and librarian without deep system knowhow and so we had the same problem to solve: just powering-off the system before going to next station :-) I tested a self-mastered Knopix-CD, ie enhanced the Knopix-CD with our lookfeel and application clients, and so you had a read-only and for ever booting system. Don't know (and I'm to lazy to Google) if there is a FreeBSD live-CD project, sure it has to be... matthias -- Matthias Apitz Manager Technical Support - OCLC PICA GmbH Gruenwalder Weg 28g - 82041 Oberhaching - Germany t +49-89-61308 351 - f +49-89-61308 399 - m +49-170-4527211 e [EMAIL PROTECTED] - w http://www.oclcpica.org/ http://guru.UnixLand.de/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
On 6/8/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: El día Thursday, June 08, 2006 a las 11:16:15AM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] escribió: Hi, I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.). Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck etc.). Google for 'KDE Kiosk. There is at at least one project I used two years ago to completely lock down a FreeBSD box using KDE and Firefox (firebird at the time, I think) You shouldn't have power-off issues if you never write data to the drive, kind of tricky unless you make it a near-disktless system that runs firefox off a network drive. Don't know (and I'm to lazy to Google) if there is a FreeBSD live-CD project, sure it has to be... FreeSBIE 2 is nearing release. -- -- Perfection is just a word I use occasionally with mustard. --Atom Powers-- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
On Thu, 8 Jun 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.). Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck etc.). I'd welcome any advice and suggestions about how to do this. Currently the information on the system is updated in situ so the file systems can't be made read only (any ideas on how we could split the updating from the deployment welcome). We also need to find a way of turning firefox into a kiosk browser. Hi drseuk, Well, the best thing to do would be to make your kiosk machine totally diskless: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html This would make the kiosk machine totally resilient to unexpected reboots. However, it sounds like you only have one machine, and you have to make everything work there. In that case, you might be able to experiment with making certain file systems read-only, and only making them RW when you want to modify the system. It looks like some work has been done with getting Firefox to work in kiosk mode, here is what Google turned up for me: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6013296355.html Good luck, -Andy Reitz. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 05:29:16PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.). Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck etc.). I tested a self-mastered Knopix-CD, ie enhanced the Knopix-CD with our lookfeel and application clients, and so you had a read-only and for ever booting system. Don't know (and I'm to lazy to Google) if there is a FreeBSD live-CD project, sure it has to be... Shouldn't be all that hard. Try simply changing your filesystems from rw to ro in /etc/fstab. I expect some logging functions may bellyache, but everything will still run. There is a Live CD in the standard CD set for each FreeBSD release that you could look at for reference. I've built controllers with FreeBSD on Soekris small boards with CF cards for disk drive and filesystems mounted ro. Used Apache, perl, mysql, php, and heck I don't remember what else. Our primary concern was write wear on the CF media. Think it was FreeBSD 4.6 or 4.7 that we used. Stripped it down to 10 MB. Compiled everything linked against shared libraries and put / and /usr in the same (my only) fs. We did add another fs for rw use. When needed it was mounted from script, written or read, then umounted on completion so that it was rarely vulnerable, but more importantly when umounted it wasn't being written to. We also used the noatime option. -- David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 11:16:15AM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] I'd welcome any advice and suggestions about how to do this. Currently the information on the system is updated in situ so the file systems can't be made read only (any ideas on how we could split the updating from the deployment welcome). There are a couple of solutions involving NFS that could be used, if you've got the bandwidth. eg: You could make all the base file-systems read-only, and mount the run-file-system over NFS; or you could make the kiosks mount everything except the root-file-system over NFS. If I recall correctly, there are examples available in the Handbook. We also need to find a way of turning firefox into a kiosk browser. Put a script in /etc/ttys that starts up X and runs firefox; maybe `startx firefox'? Cheers. -- Jonathan Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] We laugh in the face of danger, we drop icecubes down the vest of fear - Edmond Blackadder III ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
Don't know (and I'm to lazy to Google) if there is a FreeBSD live-CD project, sure it has to be... I used FreeSBIE some time ago, and it ran fine (in some situations try disabling ACPI). A current search for FreeBSD live cd-s gives several results: http://www.freesbie.org/ http://livecd.sourceforge.net/ http://www.livebsd.com/ I just couldn't get how does the bus have books on it, but I guess it is not so important. :) Atanas ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
Andy Reitz wrote: On Thu, 8 Jun 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.). Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck etc.). I'd welcome any advice and suggestions about how to do this. Currently the information on the system is updated in situ so the file systems can't be made read only (any ideas on how we could split the updating from the deployment welcome). We also need to find a way of turning firefox into a kiosk browser. Hi drseuk, Well, the best thing to do would be to make your kiosk machine totally diskless: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html This would make the kiosk machine totally resilient to unexpected reboots. However, it sounds like you only have one machine, and you have to make everything work there. In that case, you might be able to experiment with making certain file systems read-only, and only making them RW when you want to modify the system. It looks like some work has been done with getting Firefox to work in kiosk mode, here is what Google turned up for me: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6013296355.html Good luck, -Andy Reitz. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] A local library I have done some work for has a device from http://www.centuriontech.com/products/centurionguard/ It basically is a hardware solution that no mater what the user thinks they are doing, they cannot write to the disk. Sean ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] skrev: We also need to find a way of turning firefox into a kiosk browser. Alternative: http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/ -- Regards from Lars ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
