[plug] Linux en passant

[Leon Brooks]

Last night, a client of mine had one of his business premises burgled. He runs 
an application on Windows Terminal Services at a central location, and won't 
consider Linux on a workstation.

The burglars, genius benefactors of mankind that they are, elected to steal 
one of eight thin-client Win2k workstations and the antique Pentium that was 
running the Internet gateway and VPN. Just the boxes: no keyboards, mice, 
cables, hubs etc went. They also left another Win2k client machine in the 
same rack that held the two stolen boxes... go figure.

So... I borrowed a box and set it up as a replacement gateway (and I'd been 
asking him if I could update it anyway). I had to run off for a medical 
appointment so I finished the setup by remote control.

And there it sat, with a nice screen, keyboard and mouse on it, luxuries to 
which the gateway was unaccustomed. And they were short one screen.

So... a few edits of /etc/inittab later, it is now running X with no WM, and a 
fullscreened rdesktop client. I rang the business, and asked a staff member 
to tell me what they saw on the screen. They did not notice any difference 
from their usual Windows-based Terminal Server client, logged in and went 
happily to work on it. If either X or rdesktop dies, inittab restarts it (-: 
as user jrandomuser :-).

The owner is overseas on a well-earned holiday (he left yesterday, naturally), 
so it's going to be interesting seeing his reaction when he returns in a few 
weeks.

Cheers; Leon