Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk

[Sean]

Andy Reitz wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Jun 2006 drseuk at droog.sdf-eu.org wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The
>> system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The
>> problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the
>> machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.).
>>
>> Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or
>> similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against
>> arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck
>> etc.).
>>
>> I'd welcome any advice and suggestions about how to do this. Currently the
>> information on the system is updated in situ so the file systems can't
>> be made read only (any ideas on how we could split the updating from the
>> deployment welcome). We also need to find a way of turning firefox into a
>> kiosk browser.
> 
> Hi drseuk,
> 
> Well, the best thing to do would be to make your kiosk machine totally
> diskless:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html
> 
> This would make the kiosk machine totally resilient to unexpected reboots.
> 
> However, it sounds like you only have one machine, and you have to make
> everything work there. In that case, you might be able to experiment with
> making certain file systems read-only, and only making them RW when you
> want to modify the system.
> 
> It looks like some work has been done with getting Firefox to work in
> kiosk mode, here is what Google turned up for me:
> 
> http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6013296355.html
> 
> Good luck,
> 	-Andy Reitz.
> 
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A local library I have done some work for has a device from 
http://www.centuriontech.com/products/centurionguard/
It basically is a hardware solution that no mater what the user thinks 
they are doing, they cannot write to the disk.

				Sean