WIN32 questions

[Drew Whitehouse]

>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Hammond <MarkH at ActiveState.com> writes:
    Mark> "Drew Whitehouse" <Drew.Whitehouse at anu.edu.au> wrote in
    Mark> message news:wly9zdwudv.fsf at anu.edu.au...
    >> I want to have a win2k system startup (and shutdown) a
    >> full-screen
    Mark> GUI
    >> program on a dozen other win2k systems. Can I do this without
    >> having the operator logon to each of the systems manually (it's
    >> a kiosk
    Mark> like
    >> facility) ? Should I be using an NT Service ?

    Mark> The easiest way is to set the registry to auto logon.  This
    Mark> is quite simple, and documented at the MS site.
    Mark> "autoadminlogon" is the key name IIRC, which may help your
    Mark> search.

Thanks, exactly what I wanted.

    Mark> A service wont really do what you want in the general case.

I was thinking of the service more for the starting and stopping the
client programs, assuming. In a UNIX world I would have the control
system use something like remote shell. eg

rsh <hostname> "foocommand&" # startup foocommand

	and 

rsh <hostname> "killall foocommand" # zapit

I was thinking about a small DCOM server on each station for doing
this using CreateProcess but I need it to be extremely robust as it
will be administered by non technical staff. Hence I want to have the
control program be able to nuke any programs previously started and
startup a new versions. My goal is to make the system robust enough
that I can have participating machines go down, including the control
system, then be able to get the entire setup back into a running state
by telling the control system (assuming it rebooted...) to "restart"
the entire setup.  This will be another high profile public python
installation and I'm keen to have the system extremely robust (not
quite as publicly visible as the MCG scoreboard :-). Any suggestions
appreciated.

Thanks,
Drew

-- 
;; Drew.Whitehouse at anu.edu.au      Sci-Viz/VR Programmer
;; http://anusf.anu.edu.au/~drw900          ANUSF VIZLAB
;; Australian National University Supercomputer Facility