v11i020: Idle demon

[xanthian at zorch.UUCP]

james at dlss2.UUCP (James Cummings) writes:
>xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>>I gave up looking about 35% of the way through the code; do you anywhere
>>protect against killing a user during downloads, when the terminal would
>>normally be idle for long (up to several hours with a slow modem and big
>>files) periods of time?
>
>	You're absolutely right!...although I have not tested it in this 
>particular manner, I would think that during a download you WILL accumulate
>IDLE time that the program will notice.  Because of the nature of "cheating"
>users who use a looping shell program to "fake" a screen activity, I choose
>to use stat and the utmp log.  This would mean that "real" keyboard activity
>would need to occur to keep idle time from building up.

Gee, I hate to criticize someone who's being so pleasant, but compelled as I
am...

Until you see something like this, it's hard to accept that software can
display an "attitude", but here's the needed example.

You _cannot_ stop me from keeping a session alive from my home dialup line
if you make it a matter of hostility.  I can and have written little idle
loops that sit at the cursor and emit "space backspace" until I come back
to my home computer and kill the idle loop, simply to defeat "hostileware".

The user will always win, because there is always some user somewhere who
is smarter than you, finds a way to beat the system, and then shares it
with like minded friends for the glory of having "beaten that damn
autologout nuisance".

Given that trying to force autologout on a user who doesn't want it is a
waste of time, what attitude will permit autologout to serve the system?
That software that also serves the user!

Give me a autologout that takes care of the times I _do_ want to have my
session killed, and can't do it myself:

1) my modem died, and the line is burning up my account use limit for
   this time period, or money on a pay by the hour system (used to
   happen on The Well all the time before the hardware upgrade);

2) some buggy program hung the line, and I can't/don't know how to get
   in on another line and kill the session, so I can't log back on
   or continue with my work until you kill my session and free the line;

3) I fell asleep in front of my compter (happens all the time), and there's
   nothing running or backgrounded in my session of importance, and I don't
   want to anger the sysop by building up a huge idle line time account;
   please nuke me tender;

4) I have some long task to run that doesn't need watching, so I'm going
   out for a burger, fries and a look at the moonlight with a very dear
   friend, and I'd like the system to kill my session without my help
   when the task is done;

5) I typed "exit" and turned off my screen (leaving the modem on as usual)
   forgetting that I had a suspended "rn" session that was going to pop
   back up instead of my session ending.

The point being, users frequently _want_ the benefits of autologout, and
will use it as a valuable tool if it is indeed wielded for their benefit,
but will do everything in their power to disable it if you decide to make
a war with the users out of system management.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>