Identifying local and remote sessions

Question

I would like to write a startup script that would perform it's task if it was run on the local machine, but not if it was called from a remote xrdp session.

If Local
{
 do something
}
If remote
{
 do something else
}

How would I identify if the session is locally started or remotely started?

Answer 1

This is unfortunately a very difficult problem. So in the general case, the answer is unfortunately no. Looking at $DISPLAY isn't sufficient as that just means that there is a local X server in some form (like xrdp), not that the user is physically at the machine.

The only option I'm aware of is ConsoleKit, which has a "is-local" attribute. Unfortunately I don't know any easy way to check it from a shell script. You might be able to do something using "ck-list-sessions".

Also note that it had a bug at one point where you could easily trick it to thinking a remote session was local.

If security isn't that important, then I suggest checking if xrdp sets some special environment variables that are only present for that kind of session. Just run "env" in a terminal and you'll see what's available.