Hi Martin,

On Do 07 Jul 2011 12:34:55 CEST Martin Oehler wrote:

after an update to the current set of packages there are some points that should be (at least in my opinion) discussed.

Thanks for testing the packages. Your feedback on our work on X2go
will sure be valuable.

@list: note that Martin is one of the guys who are responsible for
regular releases and maintenance of Knoppix ;-)

1. Session Administration

At the moment, I can't see a user-friendly replacement of x2go- sessionadministration. This tool is crucial for network usage of x2go since your local administrator needs to be able to reset sessions, connect to an users session and all that stuff.

It is possible to handle sessions via the command line, but that, of
course, is not an option.

Would the old code compiled against the qt3-libs in Debian Squeeze lead to a working solution?

Is there another tool that I wasn't able to find? x2godesktop- sharing is of course not useable if the user session did freeze.

There is a new tool that is at most in alpha-state yet (@Alex: correct
me if that has changed recently): http://wiki.x2go.org/x2goadmincenter

Heinz has presented that tool on the Debian Edu Zweibrücken meeting in
Feb 2011, you may remember that.

Was is the recommended way of stopping an users session (please read topic two before answering, it's not that easy)? It should be ok:

• to logout from the desktop (desktop mode)
• to close a window (rootless mode)
• to issue the command x2goterminate-session on a console from within the session
• or from a terminal outside the session
• I am not sure if in X2go clusters it is also possible to terminate a session from another host in the cluster (I do not think so)

2. Database handling

How is the database cleanup of the sqlite3 database

/var/lib/x2go/x2go_sessions

supposed to work? From my point of view this database is constantly growing. I can't see that old sessions are cleaned up.

If a user connects to a LXDE of Debian Squeeze and performs a logout via the menu, his session is still listed inside the database. So this database is constantly growing what is definitely not what one wants.

I have also observed that but did not bother looking at it. It is
definitely a bug. A side effect of this is that the port is rising to
heaven (I have a server that has been up for quite a while and my
display number is :332, it started off at :50.

Another problem with this are hanging or crashed sessions. The database gets very quickly inconsistent with the real system state. The user sees a lot of session that are marked active at login but the processes belonging to these sessions do not exist anymore. I found manually cleaning up the database worked but this isn't comfortable at all (i.e. not possible to do for everyone).

x2gocleansession is running but doesn't seem to be able to clean up the database (permissions are correct, new sessions are inserted).

This should also be addressed before Baikal. I suppose that most
people with prefer sqlite for its simpleness. So we should make sure
that the X2go sqlite db backend works. Feel free to contribute with
patches etc.

3. Smartcard usage

This might be a separate topic which leads to a bug, but somehow the timing between x2go und the scdaemon messed up. If a user does a session suspend via smartcard and puts his card in again after the card is available he gets an "invalid card" error message. If one is a bit more patient and waits for 5-6 seconds it works again.

Did someone else experience this?

I can live with this at the moment.

I cannot say anything about the smartcard stuff. I haven been working
on the X2go TCE (thin client env) lately, but I virtually did not
touch the smartcard part, as I do not have a device to test that with.

At the moment I'm really struggling to get to the point where x2go was in terms of usability at "qt3-times" (I know they are gone).

Whatever you have to contribute, please do so. We could check with
Heinz to even give you access on certain projects in X2go Git.

Thanks+Greets, Mike

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