"Logon Scripts" (but NOT for Windows NT!)

[Jeff Maki <jmaki comcast net>]

Hi everybody! I hope this isn't off topic - but I was thinking (that's 
dangerous!) about starting a new project - and I wanted to be sure it 
wouldn't be a duplicate effort or something people find useless (if so, 
I won't waste my time)....

Let me start off with the problem I see and aim to solve: I'm a system 
administrator for ~20 Linux boxes, all running GNOME (of course!). While 
I was sitting in traffic one day, I thought about how nice Windows logon 
scripts were (I used to maintain 70 Windows NT boxes) - for things as 
simple as time syncronization, maintaining a uniform desktop look, and 
mapping network drives - and also thinking how useless they were, as 
they can't be run as the Administrator (and thus can't change some 
properties of the system [without special services to run scripts as 
Administrator])

Then I thought, what if GNOME had the same type of system? So, 
basically, I am soliciting ideas/comments on a project I might start to 
develop a logon-script-like system for GNOME. I guess the script would 
run before GNOME starts (so it can change GNOME setup without GNOME 
knowing) and could be signed or something using PGP - if signed, part of 
it would run as 'root', and part as the user. Or the entire thing could 
just run as the user. I was thinking that instead of using some 
elaborate RPC setup to get the script itself, I could just download the 
script from either 1) FTP or 2) connect to a TCP port and copy the 
resultant data to a file. The client could keep MD5 hashes of the 
scripts in its cache, and thus perform some sort of caching of these 
scripts. I could also make the client, when connecting to the server, 
tell the server the user, hostname, etc. so the server could customize 
the script it gives the client! Thus, each user could get their own 
script at the administrator's choice. The script itself could do things 
such as mount/unmount NFS volumes, sync the time, change gconfd values, 
etc, etc. Instead of writing an entirely new language, I'd just use 
bash's syntax (and use bash itself to process it, I guess). NIS can do 
some of these things, but things like updating the Message of the Day, 
and changing GNOME config NIS can't do.... what do you guys think? Good 
idea? Bad idea? Already been done? It might be another feature that will 
make GNOME more attractive for "enterprise" rollout. (Especially if Sun 
is going to start supporting it....)

-Jeff.