Re: disabling the rhn applet without removing it

[Don Buchholz <buchholz easystreet com>]

David Grierson wrote:

> Chris Kloiber wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 17:47 -0700, Akop Pogosian wrote:
> >
> > > Is there a way to prevent the RHN applet from showing up by default on
> > > the desktop without actually removing the whole rhn-applet package?
> > > ...
> >
> > On a per-user basis. Log in as the user, right click the icon and select
> > "exit". Then log out, this time selecting the "Save Current Setup"
> > button. I think that will work for you.
>
> So if you've got a network of n-users (where n is a suitably large 
> number) all logging into RHEL desktops ... your work-around is for the 
> admin to login as each user?
> ...
> This may be suitable if you've only got 5-10 users but if say you've 
> got 100's or 1000's? 


Hmmm, 10 users x 10 workstations ==> 100 logins.
Nope. "Homey don't play dat game."  In fact, homey
don't play dat game for 5 users x 5 workstations!

My plan would be:
 1) don't install 'rhn-applet'
 2) those who want it (and, I believe Alex said they
    would all be admins) can install the package on
    their own.

Best advice I've seen so far on this thread is David's suggestion:

David Aquilina wrote:
>  While helping deploy RHEL at my former University in a lab situation
>  (we didn't want normal users seeing the applet) we just removed
>  other's read and execute permissions. While it would be tedious to do
>  on multiple systems if you're installing by hand, a line in a
>  Kickstart %post section should do the trick nicely. 

# for h in `cat hostlist` ; do echo ==== $h ==== ; ssh $h chmod o-rwx 
/usr/bin/rhn-applet* ; done

Now, that will scale.  :-)

I certainly haven't figured out the mysteries of all
this Gnome/KDE eye-candy configuration.  It would be
nice to have a deeper understanding of where/how the
configurations are stored/managed.  I've had a few
instances of users calling with "KDE won't start" ...
The end result has been along the lines of
 # rm -rf ~user/.kde* ~user/gnom* ~user/Desktop
A little too draconian for my (and my customers') taste.

- Don