Does an O.S. software exist something similar to Display Manager, specifically the part that allows you to create VNC or HP Remote Graphics ‘next available’ connections?
We have 40 remote Centos Linux nodes with HP RGS sender and 40 Windows users with HP RGS receiver, currently, each user is given a hostname of a node, and that node is assigned to them for eternity even if they are not using it for months at a time, I would like to reduce my number of nodes and have a DM like interface they can go to, click a button and either give them the next available node (name) or a button to click and automatically connect(like DM), but most importantly log users out if they are not actively using it for a period of time. The log out issues is the tuff one since if they just click the ‘x’ Linux reports they are still logged in, log entries do not seem to change and ‘w’ or ‘last -a’ commands show they are still logged in similar to if they simply locked the desktop.
FYI, they use these remote Linux nodes to qsub jobs to PBS.
I think there is no open source solution available to meet these requirements
Case 0:
a. use qsub -I -X which will give you the terminal session of a compute node
b. with this compute node assigned to your job , the user can initiate their VNC or RDP or RGS session
b(i): probably there is a script on that machine, on executing it , it opens the display session.
Case 1:
a. Submit a PBS batch job script, which creates a VNC connector file/link or RDP connector file/link or RGS connector file or link with the details of the node on which it has been scheduled by the PBS Server . The connector link should be created in a shared folder accessible by the Windows users (or respective Windows users Desktop) say with this name ( displayjob. )
b. The user would click on this connector file or link and get the required display
c. Once the job is finished, he would delete this connector file.
d. a server periodic hook will scan whether shared folder with connector files , if the connector files does not exist , but display jobs are active, it will kill those jobs.
Case 2:
a. Integrate PBS Jobs + middleware + Apache Guacamole server
* middleware is something that attaches the job ID to the Guacamole session.
You can deploy a mom periodic hook that checks the load on the system and if the load on the system has not changed for “X” period of time, then kill the Display Jobs ( these jobs might be tagged with custom resource, or these jobs submit to “displayQ” ) , the batch jobs would be untouched if in case they are using the same system.