use aufs instead of tmpfs for guest account

[Hadmut Danisch]

lightdm creates a directory in /tmp and mounts a tmpfs over it as a home directory for guest users.

I'd prefer it (at least as a configurable option) if it instead would mount /tmp/guest... over /home/guest via an aufs file system. That way the admin could provide some default contents, that are completely restored for every login, and it does not waste RAM.

regards

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: lightdm 1.0.5-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-13.21-generic 3.0.6
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-13-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Nov 5 11:09:46 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:de_DE:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/tcsh
SourcePackage: lightdm
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-29 (6 days ago)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Hi Hadmut,
As regards possibilities for an admin to customize the guest session feature, you may want to study this tutorial: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1566078

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

Hi Gunnar,

thanks for the hint.

Does that "tutorial" still aply? Seems to be almost a year old.

And I noticed that my test machine with an early beta version of 11.10 still came with those guest-session packages (and the guest session could be disabled by simply removing the guest session package), while machines upgraded or freshly installed with the final 11.10 don't have these packages. Seems as if these guest session functionality had been moved into lightdm itself somewhere in the beta state of 11.10. There is not even a /etc/guest-session on my machines.

Now it seems to setup the guest account through /usr/sbin/guest-account, which uses some files from /etc/guest-session, if they exist. It however allows only local settings, but not a different method of mounting the file system.

The solution might be to write a completely different shell script, and I guess the configuration variable guest-account-script would allow to run a different guest script than /usr/sbin/guest-account.

Which is not really advisable since the documentation of lightdm is rather poor and it is not exactly obvious what lightdm expects from this script.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2011-11-05 12:04, Hadmut Danisch wrote:
> Does that "tutorial" still aply? Seems to be almost a year old.

It is, but I updated it a couple of days ago with a tarball aimed at 11.10 and LightDM.

> Seems as if these guest session functionality had been
> moved into lightdm itself somewhere in the beta state of 11.10.

Right.

> There is not even a /etc/guest-session on my machines.

It's created if you install that tarball.

> Now it seems to setup the guest account through
> /usr/sbin/guest-account, which uses some files from /etc/guest-session,
> if they exist.

Precisely.

> It however allows only local settings, but not a different method of
> mounting the file system.

True, but I got the impression from your bug description that it's customization possibilities you are after, and that changing the mount method isn't an end in itself.

Why not install the tarball for LightDM and study its customization ideas?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Btw, you can also design a custom skeleton for guests instead of /etc/skel and put it into /etc/guest-session/skel.