Epoptes – Open source computer lab management and monitoring tool

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Epoptes is an open source computer lab management and monitoring tool. It allows for screen broadcasting and monitoring, remote command execution, message sending, imposing restrictions like screen locking or sound muting the clients and much more!

Install Epoptes on ubuntu

Epoptes consists of a server package called epoptes and a client package called epoptes-client. Install the server part on the PC where you'll be monitoring the clients from. If you want to use the GUI from a thin-client, install it on the LTSP server.

Open the terminal and run the following commands

For server package

sudo apt-get install epoptes

After the installation you need to add some users to group "epoptes". These users will be allowed to launch the GUI and control clients:

gpasswd -a username epoptes

Users that are currently logged on need to logoff/logon for the group change to take effect.

For client package

sudo apt-get install epoptes-client

Then you need to tell epoptes-client to which server it should connect. By default, it will try to connect to the DNS name "server". If you don't have a DNS server, you can put that in /etc/hosts.

If you don't want to use "server" as the server name where the clients connect to, see the configuration section.

Also note that packages are not allowed to start programs inside a user's session, so you need to logoff and logon for epoptes-client installation to take effect.

Epoptes Configuration

Per-user settings are stored in ~/.config/epoptes. Most of them are exposed in the application UI, but you can also manually edit the files in that directory for more obscure settings.

The server package settings are stored in /etc/default/epoptes. There you can specify the unix group which members are allowed to launch the application GUI. By default that is set to epoptes, but for example you can create a staff group and modify the group line in the configuration file as follows:

# Epoptes server will use the following group for the communications socket.
# That means that any user in that group will be able to launch the epoptes UI
# and control the clients.

SOCKET_GROUP=staff

The client package settings are stored in /etc/default/epoptes-client. A useful variable in that file is SERVER, which is the DNS name or IP address of the server that the clients will be connecting to:

# The server which epoptes-client will be connecting to.
# If unset, thin client user sessions running on the server will try to connect
# to "localhost", while thin client root sessions and fat or standalone clients
# will try to connect to "server".
# LTSP automatically puts "server" in /etc/hosts for thin and fat clients,
# but you'd need to put "server" in DNS manually for standalone clients.

SERVER=fatclient5

Be careful not to put spaces around the equal signs in those files, as they're shell files and it would be considered a syntax error. You can check for syntax errors with

sh -n /etc/default/epoptes

Manually updating the OpenSSL certificate

You shouldn't ever need to manually update the epoptes OpenSSL certificate, but if you need to, here's a command to get you started

openssl req -batch -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:1024 -days 1826 -keyout /etc/epoptes/server.key -out /etc/epoptes/server.crt

Screenshot

epoptes

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