[Mark Herbert]

Hi All,

I work at a primary (elementary) school in South Australia and am looking at putting SETI (chugging away for Team MacNN of course) on our OS8.6/9 iMacs (I have read the stories, but I will be doing this with the school's permission). I chose SETI over the others because it is easy to explain to the kids and it fits in nicely with all the work classes are doing on space.

Here are my problems

1. How can I set up SETI to run as a screen saver while at the Macintosh Manager Login screen ( as this is where 90% of idle time is spent).

2. SETI cannot connect to the internet through our Linux proxy and firewall without a Username and Password. Is there some way I can set the proxy to see SETI as a different user to the student who is browsing the Web? (As you may have noticed I know very little about our Linux boxes, I am just looking for some information that I can give the guy who looks after them for us)

Thanks in Advance,
Mark

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by Mark Herbert:
<STRONG>Hi All,

I work at a primary (elementary) school in South Australia and am looking at putting SETI (chugging away for Team MacNN of course) on our OS8.6/9 iMacs (I have read the stories, but I will be doing this with the school's permission). I chose SETI over the others because it is easy to explain to the kids and it fits in nicely with all the work classes are doing on space.

Here are my problems

1. How can I set up SETI to run as a screen saver while at the Macintosh Manager Login screen ( as this is where 90% of idle time is spent).

2. SETI cannot connect to the internet through our Linux proxy and firewall without a Username and Password. Is there some way I can set the proxy to see SETI as a different user to the student who is browsing the Web? (As you may have noticed I know very little about our Linux boxes, I am just looking for some information that I can give the guy who looks after them for us)

Thanks in Advance,
Mark</STRONG>

To #1, I have no clue. I can tell you how in X, but not in 9. Someone else might know though, but I don't think it can be done.

To #2, just get a username and password and set it up in the SETI preferences.

--Scott

[reader50]

Originally posted by Mark Herbert:
...
1. How can I set up SETI to run as a screen saver while at the Macintosh Manager Login screen ( as this is where 90% of idle time is spent)
...

SETI@home will run just fine at the Login window. Configure it in the Master account, then disable access to it in all the user accounts.

Turn the hotcorner and hotkeys off to avoid annoying the users. Set a 5-minute activation delay, or other delay as you feel is appropriate. I would suggest limiting the graphics to 1-minute before it goes to blank. We have a modification listed on this page to make SETI@home skip the graphics and go straight to the blank screen.

I tested it with a Limited account (Control Panel access turned off) and it worked fine, both while logged in as Limited, and at the Login screen. While logged in, the SETI icon still showed in the menu bar, but it's choices did nothing. If you wish, you can visit this page for hack details on how to remove the SETI icon from the menu bar. The page in question is for general SETI hiding, but you can apply portions of the hacks separately, including the steps to remove the menu bar icon (step #7). You can also move SETI@home to the Extensions folder (after changing it's type/creator) if you wish to allow general Control Panels access.

There is a lot of information on that second page that you might find useful in keeping SETI@home running, but out of the hands of your users. Enjoy, and don't be hesitant to ask more questions.

[Mark Herbert]

Thankyou very much for the link. My next question was how to hide the menu.

We have sorted out the problem of connecting through the firewall. Due to the way the Education Department has arranged net access we set up a copy of squid on another port on our Linux proxy which is permanently logged on just for SETI which has a fairly short timeout.

I need to go and d/l Resedit now.

Cheers,
Mark

[dmarshall]

This is great info, but the links are not active, I get a 404 error.

We are also interested in the Seti@home project for our school, so I would like to find the info contained in the link pages.

In addition, I would simply like to customize the mm client login panel at our school. We are running os x server and os 9.x clients w/mac manager.

Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

David

[reader50]

Links fixed. The site pages had been reorganized since that post. No pages were lost, they just got placed into subfolders by project.

There are also corresponding pages for OSX and OSX CLI. All such links are listed on our SETI news page in the Resources section.