A question about Cybercafe programs....

[Mierdaan]

Hey all you fellow tech-heads...
Does anyone know a good program for managing PCs in a CyberCafe environment? Right now we're using a shell program over Win98 called Netcafe, and the thing is slowly sucking my will to live; no multiple windows, no frames in the watered-down web browser it allows, no ability to send file attachments, and it even has the nerve to crash every 15 seconds. Admittedly, we're only using Pentium 150s with ISDN hookups, but even so... this thing is just horrid.

So, run downtown to your local CyberCafe, see what program they're using! Please! Help! I'm sick of getting asked "What does 'invalid page fault' mean?"

-Mierdaan

 

[Ladi]

Only allow users to login as guest + find a few of the "child" lockdown programs out there that will let you restrict what applications can be run and locations where saving is and is not permissible, etc. Instead of a particular "cybercafe" app, I'd say to find 'child protection' or other similar apps to control access.

~Ladi

 

[Mierdaan]

Ladi-
All good ideas, and definitely ones I've thought about, but one (perhaps the only) good feature of Netcafe is the time monitoring aspect; with these internet kiosk kinds of setups, you need a way for the program you're running to be able to kick users off according to how much time they've bought. With Netcafe, we use 'smartcards' which we encode with 20 or 60 minutes of time... the users just stick the cards in a reader, and it fires up and away they go. If we were to use user accounts on NT or something of that nature, it would restrict access, but not time.

-Mierdaan