Re: [HTCondor-users] Problems detecting mouse/keyboard with Fedora

[Michael V Pelletier <Michael.V.Pelletier@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm running Red Hat Enteprise Linux 6 here,
and had a similar issue with our workstations. I had tried running the
kbdd as root, but since home directories are on a root-squashed NFS filesystem,
it wasn't able to read the cookies for the users, and thus was unable to
connect to the display to monitor activity. I'm not sure if it'll be exactly
what you need, but hopefully it'll at least get you closer.

The trick in our case is that the condor_kbdd,
in order to detect GNOME console activity, has to be attached with the
user's session, and owned by the user. This is discussed in section 3.12.5
in the 8.2.9 manual, but it is a bit short of explicit guidance due to
the variety of different platforms involved.

For the RHEL6 GNOME, you need to add
an "htcondor-kbdd.sh" script to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d to start
it up on login, and update /etc/gdm/PostSession/Default to shut it down
on logout.

The gist of the htcondor-kbdd.sh file
is:

if [ -x /usr/sbin/condor_kbdd ] ; then
        if [ -d $HOME/.kbdd.log
] ; then
           
    /bin/mv -f $HOME/.kbdd.log/KbdLog $HOME/.kbdd.log/KbdLog.old
        else
           
    if [ -e $HOME/.kbdd.log ] ; then
           
            /bin/rm -f $HOME/.kbdd.log
           
    fi
        fi
        /usr/sbin/condor_kbdd
-l $HOME/.kbdd.log -pidfile $HOME/.kbdd.pid
fi

This does some basic sanity checking
as you can see, by rotating the log file from a previous session and removing
any non-directory that might block the daemon's creation of the directory.
The condor_kbdd drops into the background by itself, so doesn't need an
&.

The PostSession/Default script runs
as root, and for obvious security reasons condor_kbdd doesn't want to run
as root, so you have to switch to the session owner to run condor_kbdd
-k to kill the daemon. So we have:

if [ -f "$HOME/.kbdd.pid" ] ; then
        /bin/su $USER
-c \
           
    "/usr/sbin/condor_kbdd -k $HOME/.kbdd.pid ;
/bin/rm -f $HOME/.kbdd.pid"
fi

This approach is preferable to an OS
kill because it allows the kbdd to take itself down 100% gracefully, doing
whatever updates it needs to do before exiting.

After setting this up, the ConsoleIdle
and KeyboardIdle attributes showed the expected responses to keyboard and
mouse activity.

More information on these /etc/gdm scripts
are here: https://help.gnome.org/admin/gdm/stable/configuration.html.en

It's probably possible to do everything
under the /etc/gdm scripots, but the fact that they run as root led me
to use the xinitrc.d options instead for startup, in alignment with the
general recommendations in the manual. Feel free to share anything you
discover that might simplify things.

        -Michael
Pelletier.