This week, with considerable help of Mike McCabe, my OSDL team came up with a new concept for our competition project. Being a long one, I do not have time to recite it here, though I will some time soon.
I have attempted to stabilize the lab build. At boot, a script checks if the hostname is set to a correct value (itl-lab-X or cosi-lab-Y). If it is something unexpected (for example, "localhost" or "unknown"), the script prompts for an eligible name. At last, the script fixes configuration files according to the hostname it has. As I am working on a project for OSDL that has similar tasks of maintaining a few almost similar systems, I may be able to utilize it in future.
Since ethereal needs root privileges to capture packets, and sudo access to the application allows for overwriting system files, I am working on an alternate solution -- a sandbox (also known as chrooted environment or jail). There is a possibility of writing up a paper on how to do this on Gentoo.
In plans, I need to edit the default COSI GDM theme to include the words "Powered by Gentoo," because there is a possibility that some workstations are going to be run on different distributions but with the same GDM theme.
Rouslan Solomakhin