We have a series of touch screen workstations located on our production floor. The interface is locked down so that IE7 is the only application running in the foreground, like a kiosk. The problem we have is that the internal web server that IE7 points to sometimes crashes, which after restarting requires that we go to each kiosk and manually reload the page. I would like to either have a custom IE7 error page that comes up once it can't connect to out internal web server that has a 'reload' or 'retry' button, or some way to do this automatically at specific intervals, if possible.
To clarify, I am looking for a way to limit the amount of human sysadmin interaction at each of these workstations when an error occurs connecting to our internal web server. I don't want to have to go to each station, connect a mouse/kb, just so I can hit the reload button and bring the web app back up.
The kiosk software should have a reload-to-home-page action executed when the terminal is idle for a few minutes, and a "restart" button including custom error pages. If no dedicated kiosk software is used perhaps one should be if the requirements demand these features ^^
I think Firefox can be configured in kiosk mode with a visible home button - useful for kiosk users as well as admins.
The kiosk software I've used always had stuff like this including central configuration, they were usually not expensive either.
If there's an easy way to send a "go to home" command to a running instance/tab of IE7 then you could create a custom screen saver or a scheduled task that starts on inactivity to trigger this...
I've worked recently with kiosk applications, and should say you, that there must be a possibility to logon as administrator. It's not very clever, that developer didn't create such possibility, see the documentation for this product.
Seconds, the unstable work of IE7 is mainly the result of some 3rd party applications or worms/viruses that works on this computer. Make a clean up !
God bless system administrators !