Porteus

I've set up a few kiosks (duplicated kiosks in 3 remote sites) although overall I'm still fairly novice on the Porteus Kiosk system. Each kiosk client is locked into a custom walk-through tutorial. It's actually a powerpoint presentation that has been converted to HTML, so I'm using Chrome on the kiosks and it's just locked into the tutorial (running locally from the html files and resources placed on each machine in opt/storage/). Users navigate through the tutorial using a touchscreen. I am using the Porteus Kiosk Server Premium for remote monitoring and management. While I do get the monitoring statistics that the premium version provides (cpu & memory usage, etc.), I would like to get some statistics on how much the kiosk is actually being used. In other words, I would like to be able to see how often someone is actually interacting with the touch kiosk. This could either be in the form of looking at how much each html page is being looked at or could simply be a log of how often the screen is being touched/interacted with during a certain timeframe. Without getting into complex and heavy customizations, is there a somewhat simple/straightforward way to add this type of monitoring/statistics to the system?

Thanks!!

Hello TXiAccess,

Browsers have strong security to protect from 3rd parties trying to steal any info from them.
PK Server "Premium" cant be used for this type of 'users activity' monitoring i'm afraid.

Only one thing comes to my mind at the moment. Unfortunately it requires some customization:

Add login manager to the kiosk which would send 'session-start' call to your website (including kiosk hostname) as soon as 'Login' button is pressed.
'session-end' call would be send when user closes the browser. You could use 'session_idle=' parameter to end session when users forget to close the session themselves.

By examining Apache logs you would know exactly which kiosk was used and when.

If you are interested then please contact with builds@porteus-kiosk.org.

Thank you.

Thank you for your quick response fanthom. That certainly makes sense on the browser security, I was more thinking that maybe there was an opportunity to track file access since it's just pulling all of the html content locally.

Would there be any possibility of tracking wake events? I have the dpms_idle set to 60. Even that would be good enough. I'm just trying to figure out some way to know if this kiosk is being touched daily, every few days, every few weeks, etc.? Doesn't have to be much more insight then that.

Thank you!

Perhaps you could use 'run_command=' parameter to setup a process which would track an idle time in a loop.

If idle is lower than "some value" then execute following command:
echo "$(date) activity detected" >> /var/log/activity.log

You could make /var/log folder persistent to keep this log persistent across kiosk reboots: From PK Server you could read this file over SSH to see result.

Thanks