On Jan 30, 2008 2:19 PM, Jason Grout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Joel B. Mohler wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 10:13:09AM -0600, Jason Grout wrote: > >> Now, for the ncurses part. It seems like it would be very, very nice to > >> have a minimal admin menu using ncurses or newt (with the python snack > >> module) or dialog. Each of these has a python module, so hopefully it > >> should be fairly easy. I've never done any text-based GUI programming, > >> but I'm willing to try to whip up something. Are there any experts here > >> that could give some advice about what to use or how to do it (or whip > >> something up even faster)? It seems that an interface that at least has > >> the options to create a remote ssh account, set up sage to start on > >> bootup, and set the networking information for the box (DHCP or a static > >> address) would answer some of the issues above. In the future, we could > >> add to the menu and keep things simple for non-unix people. > > > > Wouldn't it be much easier to program and use if the vmware image would > > start a > > web server (presumably something from twisted) and provide control panel > > from > > the default IP address? All of these configuration things (which don't > > involve > > vmware player) are quite doable from a web interface. This is would fit in > > to > > the sage web interface idea and also be quite similar to the things that > > anyone > > needs to know to set up any old router that they buy for their home network. > > > > All you have to do then is start the image in vmware player, wait a suitable > > period of time, load up your web-browser and go to http://192.168.x.x. > > That's a good point; it would be more familiar and possibly easier to > use. Are there security issues with this? Having a default > publicly-accessible configuration panel seems like an exploit waiting to > happen (even if we have a default username/password). That's why I > preferred the image being locked down until someone sitting at the > console opened it up to outside access.
We should install a _minimal_ X server and window manager, and completely replace the current text view on bootup with a similar GUI that comes from the X server (but hopefully looks like a native windows app as much as possible). This way the users mouse won't get trapped. Also, maybe cut and paste will work. (This is actually how the sage-vmware image used to be 2 years ago.) A minimal X server takes very little disk space, e.g., Damn Small Linux has one and it takes < 60MB or so for all of Linux. People should not have to worry about username / passwords on windows by default. This isn't a problem at all if the vmware image is using shared networking, which is the *default*, since then only the local computer can connect to the vmware image. The only time the sort of security issues that sparked this discussion come up are when one explicitly changes the notebook to use bridged networking. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
