. Install the server part on the PC where you'll be monitoring the clients from. If you want to use the GUI from a thin-client, install it on the LTSP server.
Server package installation
Execute the following commands as root (use
sudo -i first on Ubuntu or
su - on Debian):
==> now run the commands from the "Adding the epoptes PPA to your sources" step
apt-get install epoptes
After the installation you need to add some users to group "epoptes" (or use another group as mentioned in the Configuration section below). These users will be allowed to launch the GUI and control clients:
gpasswd -a username epoptes
Users that are currently logged on need to logoff/logon for the group change to take effect (or use
newgrp).
Client package installation for LTSP chroots
For LTSP chroots, execute the following commands. Substitute i386 with amd64 if you have an amd64 chroot:
sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386
==> now run the commands from the "Adding the epoptes PPA to your sources" step
apt-get install epoptes-client
epoptes-client -c # Fetches the OpenSSL certificate from the server
exit
On Ubuntu, you also need to update the NBD image for the changes to take effect:
sudo ltsp-update-image
Client package installation for standalone clients
For all other cases, e.g. standalone clients, execute those commands as root (use
sudo -i first on Ubuntu or
su - on Debian):
==> now run the commands from the "Adding the epoptes PPA to your sources" step
apt-get install epoptes-client
epoptes-client -c # Fetches the OpenSSL certificate from the server
Then you need to tell
epoptes-client to which server it should connect. By default, it will try to connect to the DNS name "server". If you don't have a DNS server, you can put that in
/etc/hosts.
If you don't want to use "server" as the server name where the clients connect to, see the following section.
Also note that packages are not allowed to start programs inside a user's session, so you need to logoff and logon for epoptes-client installation to take effect.
Configuration
Per-user settings are stored in ~/.config/epoptes. Most of them are exposed in the application UI, but you can also manually edit the files in that directory for more obscure settings.
The server package settings are stored in /etc/default/epoptes. There you can specify the unix group which members are allowed to launch the application GUI. By default that is set to epoptes, but for example you can create a staff group and modify the group line in the configuration file as follows:
# Epoptes server will use the following group for the communications socket.
# That means that any user in that group will be able to launch the epoptes UI
# and control the clients.
SOCKET_GROUP=staff
The client package settings are stored in /etc/default/epoptes-client. A useful variable in that file is SERVER, which is the DNS name or IP address of the server that the clients will be connecting to:
# The server which epoptes-client will be connecting to.
# If unset, thin client user sessions running on the server will try to connect
# to "localhost", while thin client root sessions and fat or standalone clients
# will try to connect to "server".
# LTSP automatically puts "server" in /etc/hosts for thin and fat clients,
# but you'd need to put "server" in DNS manually for standalone clients.
SERVER=fatclient5
Be careful not to put spaces around the equal signs in those files, as they're shell files and it would be considered a syntax error. You can check for syntax errors with
sh -n /etc/default/epoptes
Notes for ltsp-cluster
If you have multiple application servers and are using ltsp-cluster, you need to install epoptes-client to each one of the application servers by following the "Client package installation for standalone clients" section above.
Manually updating the OpenSSL certificate
You shouldn't ever need to manually update the epoptes OpenSSL certificate, but if you need to, here's a command to get you started. You can read more options in the
openssl man page.
openssl req -batch -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:1024 -days 1826 -keyout /etc/epoptes/server.key -out /etc/epoptes/server.crt
