v11i020: Idle demon ... and philosophy / psychology thereof

[Peter S. Shenkin]

In article <FooBarg24.124538.903 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG > xanthian at zorch.UUCP writes:
 >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".
 > [[etc.]]

How about this idea:  an autologout program should provide users a mechanism
to subvert it.  My guess is that almost all people keeping the line open
when they're not really doing anything are doing so by accident, and would
welcome being logged out.  One could provide users a means of protecting
themselves -- either the whole session or a particular process -- from being 
logged out, which the user could invoke when running kermit or something.  
For instance, a script could be written called "nologout" which could be 
invoked as "nologout kermit", which would write a lock file that the daemon 
could check, and which would remove the lock file once kermit exited.  This
could even be incorporated in the /usr/local/bin version of kermit.  There 
are other and probably better ways to implement this idea, and certainly better 
things to name the procedure!  But most sites get along well without idle 
daemons, and others add them to protect the system against forgetful users.  So
it seems reasonable to provide a user with a way of saying, "Don't log me
out, even though I appear to be idle."  The two main advantages are that
(1) the idle daemon need not do sophisticated checking;  it need not even
provide for a class of "immune" users -- who, frankly, can be as forgetful as
anywone else;  how many times have you come in Monday morning to find root
still logged in from Friday?  (2) It would answer Kent's concern, by putting
users back in control;  they could then find other things to be hostile
about :-).

	-P.
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Peter S. Shenkin, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College, New York, NY  10027
(212)854-1418  shenkin at cunixc.cc.columbia.edu(Internet)  shenkin at cunixc(Bitnet)
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