You can set up a dashboard-display on an overview monitor like this:
- Hardware:
- An old harddisk-less desktop PC and a shiny new wide flatscreen monitor, as big as possible, mounted on the wall. No mouse or keyboard needed. One boot CD in the PC to boot from.
- Software:
- Thinstation 2.2.1, http://thinstation.sf.net, with a Firefox package. You could possibly also use http://webconverger.org. Both solutions need some tweaking, depending on the PC's hardware, but it is doable. My Thinstation boot image is around 24 MB in size and boots from BIOS to dashboard in one minute on a Compaq Evo. To be able to launch Firefox in full screen, I use the Firefox extension "Full Fullscreen 2.0".
You then need to establish a web-page that Firefox can use as a start page with no password needed.
- Add a user with very few authorizations.
- Add an alternative start page to Zope, that will log this user on automatically.
Let me show you how I did this:
Step 1:
Add the user "kiosk" with let's say, password "kiosk" in Zenoss. Give it low user rights, for instance "ZenMonitor".
Step 2:
Go to http://YourZenossServer:8080/zport/portal_skins/manage and add a "Folder" with Id "kiosk" and remember to put a check mark in "Create public interface"
Click on "kiosk" and "index_html" to modify this html-file. Insert the following content instead of the default text:
<html>
<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Kiosk login</title></head>
<body onload="document.loginform.submit();">
<form method="post" name="loginform" action="http://YourZenossServer:8080/zport/acl_users/cookieAuthHelper/login">
<input name="came_from" value="http://YourZenossServer:8080/zport/dmd" type="hidden">
<input name="submitted" value="true" type="hidden">
<input name="__ac_name" value="kiosk" type="hidden">
<input name="__ac_password" value="kiosk" type="hidden">
<input value="Submit" type="hidden">
</form>
</body>
</html>
Change "YourZenossServer", so it reflects the correct address of your Zenoss server. Press "Save changes" Click the tab "Security". Give the permission "View" to "Anonymous" (just one check mark). Press "Save changes"
Try out the link http://YourZenossServer:8080/zport/portal_skins/kiosk
You should now be able to see the dashboard with automatic login.
Then you can set this link as a start page for Firefox on the overview monitor. It is set up in prefs.js as:
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage","http://YourZenossServer:8080/zport/portal_skins/kiosk");
Have fun, Torben
