Cafe Timer App?

[romeo mangaccat]

Hello Endless Team,

Do you have a simple internet cafe timer app?

I installed Endless on one client pc in my internet cafe but its hard to monitor the time used and amount payable because there is no available app for this.

Thank you.

Romeo B. Mangaccat Jr.
Maddela Digiprint@net
Maddela, Quirino
Philippines
+63 9178551509

[Roddy Shuler]

Hi, Romeo.

We don't have an internet cafe timer app at this time.

One relatively simple thing you could do is to SSH into the machine and then run the `last` command to see details of the most recent logins.

For example, to see details on the last 5 logins for the `shared` user, you could run the following:

last -R shared | head -5

Here is an example of the output on my laptop (the "1+" means "one day plus...", the rest is in "hours:minutes"):

$ last -R roddy | head -8
roddy :0 Sun Sep 25 07:36 still logged in
roddy :0 Sat Sep 24 08:06 - 23:33 (15:27)
roddy :0 Thu Sep 22 15:05 - 00:07 (1+09:02)
roddy :0 Wed Sep 21 14:26 - 15:03 (1+00:37)
roddy :0 Tue Sep 20 08:46 - 14:26 (1+05:39)
roddy :0 Tue Sep 20 08:25 - 08:46 (00:20)
roddy :0 Mon Sep 19 22:29 - 23:27 (00:58)
roddy :0 Mon Sep 19 10:19 - 15:51 (05:32)

If this would work for you, let me know if you need more explicit instructions on setting up remote access or how to script this to make it easier to run.

Roddy

[romeo mangaccat]

Thanks Roddy.

I am currently downloading Endless OS 3.0.3 and then i'll try your suggestion after it's downloaded and installed.

I am using handy cafe timer in my shop with windows os and I really like to use endless os if we have a simple timer app close to this.

This is my setup under windows os:
I have a server pc and 12 client pcs. After start up of the client pcs, it automatically shows a lock screen which can be unlocked by the server pc showing the real time used and amount.

No doubt of completely using Endless OS in my cafe even if i manually monitor the time :). But i will be grateful if you can provide me with explicit instructions for a simple timer for my cafe.

Best Regards.

[Roddy Shuler]

Hi, Romeo.

Sorry for the delay on getting back to you. I finally had some time to experiment with this a little, and here is what I came up with...

First, you need to enable remote access on the client machine:
- Log in user your administrative account
- User menu (lower-left corner) --> Settings --> Sharing
- Turn the switch on the Sharing top bar to ON
- Specify a unique Computer Name
- Click on Remote Login and set the switch to ON
- Enter the password for your administrative account
- Log out of your administrative account

Now, on your management computer, assuming it is also running Endless (or any Linux distro):
- Open the terminal (e.g., go to the desktop and search for "term" and then click on the "Terminal" application)
- Type the following -- I'm going to assume your administrative account is named "admin_name", and you want to monitor the last 5 sessions of the "shared" account on a computer named "client_machine" (note the need for the ".local" after the computer name):
ssh admin_name@client_machine.local -C last -R shared | head -5
- Enter the password for your administrative account

If you don't want to have to enter your password every time, you can generate an ssh key on your management computer with the following command:
ssh-keygen -t rsa

And then add the contents of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the client machine, for example with the following command:
ssh admin_name@client_machine.local -C mkdir -p ~/.ssh
scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub admin_name@client_machine.local:~/.ssh/authorized_keys

I hope that helps!

Roddy