remote mol-sessions with X-windows or vnc.

[Samuel Rydh]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 04:25:50PM +0200, Peter Åstrand wrote:
>
> 1) Each MOL must use a separate partition or image file to load MacOS. 
> It might be feasible to let each user have their own 1GB image file in 
> their home directory, but it would be *much* nicer if the copy-on-write 
> functionality (earlier discussed on this mailing list) could be brought 
> back to life.

Eventually this will happen....

> 2) MOL seems to have some kind of "session number" concept, which I 
> don't really understand. If this needs to be some kind of unique 
> integer, perhaps the DISPLAY variable could do.

Well, the session number scheme is mostly a historical
artifact. I think I will rip it out completely.

> 3) I've noticed that the MOL processes are running as root, which scares 
> me a bit. 

There are not a lot of alternatives to running MOL as root. Access to
most devices (console video, block devices, networking, USB, cd-burners)
requires root access. MOL could possibly drop root privileges
after the initial startup but at least USB hotplugging will not
work if that scheme is used.

Note that the OS that MOL runs is completely unprivileged though.
The client OS is completely isolated from the linux system.

>It also means that the users cannot kill their own sessions.

Hmm... this used to work. I'll investigate...


/Samuel