[Kde-kiosk] Problem with Applying Group Profiles to new Users

[Murray Trainer]

Martijn Klingens wrote:

>On Friday 21 January 2005 18:20, Murray Trainer wrote:
>  
>
>>Basically - the groups command give correct results and your program
>>doesn't.  It appears to remember the old values - could it be a problem
>>with your C code not reallocating the memory that it stores the results
>>in properly or something like that?  But why only for LDAP groups?  
>>    
>>
>
>We're talking about separate invocations of the program, so this cannot be 
>possible, at least not if the security model is anything sane :)
>
>Somehow the information seems cached, but where. getgrnam is a really old 
>standard Unix function, so if it doesn't work properly on a correct setup I'd 
>be mightily surprised.
>
>That said, this is not my code, and this is not an area on which I have expert 
>knowledge, so I really can't comment more on the matter than just this.
>
>  
>
>>One question I have to ask is has the Kiosk tool been tested to work
>>properly using LDAP elsewhere?   Everything else is my LDAP setup seems
>>to be working fine - it is only the Kiosk tool having problems.  I still
>>think it is worth looking at the source code of the groups command as
>>that does the right thing.
>>    
>>
>
>It probably is, but I am not sure if I'm the right person to do it. If nobody 
>steps up I'll try it somewhere next week, but my time is even more limited 
>than normally for the next two weeks, so I'd much prefer another volunteer, 
>sorry... 
>
>We'll see :)
>
>  
>
I am only creating a few accounts for trial users at this stage so I can
live with the problem for a while.  I have been pushing a bit now to try 
and resolve this problem because it will be real pain later in a 
production environment with lots of users.  We have definitely narrowed 
the problem down a fair bit.  I will see if I can get a copy of the SuSE 
source code for the groups command and have a look at the relevant 
section.  I will see if I can keep this moving towards resolution while 
you are busy.  Waldo Bastian is the original author of the Kiosk Tool - 
some feedback from him might be helpful if he is available.

I saw a recent interesting article on the KDE site by someone at Novell
about using KDE Kiosk Tool with LDAP:

http://enterprise.kde.org/news.php#itemPolicyBasedLinuxDesktopEnvironment

Have you read that one?  Maybe you should add a link to it
from your Kiosk Tool page.   I might try and get in touch with the
author and see if he has encountered the same problem as me.  I am using
OpenLDAP 2 (Suse version 2.2.6-34) - the Novell guy was using Novell's
directory server.