Helpful bugme notifications

[stum]

In an effort to make quick stations more usable, it would be helpful if the logout reminders that bugme triggers indicates the nearest Athena cluster and the current cluster combo.

[jdreed]

Can you expand on what you mean by "make quick stations more usable"? They're designed for short login sessions for checking mail, printing documents, etc. What tasks do you find yourself starting on a quickstation that take long enough that they would need to be finished in a cluster? If the quickstations have a usage model we did not anticipate, we can look into changing the time limit.

I suspect that identifying the nearest cluster would be Hard(tm), short of maintaining a manual mapping. For some quickstations, there really is no "nearest" cluster -- even the cluster that is geographically close would be inconvenient to get to. Additionally, clusters are sometimes closed for maintenance or cleaning, and it would be unfortunate if the bugme dialog directed someone halfway across campus to a closed cluster.

However, we could consider adding links to xcluster in one of the panel menus, thus making it easier to locate the nearest cluster.

[jdreed]

I really want more feedback from the original bug reporter on what "more usable" means.

I don't want to put a lot of effort into having bugme display the combo, because the combo may be going away in the foreseeable future.

I think if we do anything, we could add a "Cluster Map" link to the greeter, but that's also low priority.