Program to log off idle users

[Dave Sill]

In article <11077:Oct1721:21:2390 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu>, brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>
>Those who say that idle daemons are impossible to do well have not
>learned to distinguish between sessions and connections. An idle daemon
>is something to cut short an idle *connection*. If you are connected to
>a session running a window manager that uses several ttys, what should
>the idle daemon kill? Each individual tty? Of course not. It's an idle
>*connection*, not an idle session, that's dangerous. 

I don't think it's as simple as that, Dan.  If I'm sitting on my
workstation with active xterms to various systems, what's dangerous
about one or more of those connections being idle?  Isn't it really an 
*unattended* connection that's dangerous?

Idleness is just a kludge for detecting the presence of an individual,
and killing idle connections is a kludge for re-validating them.
Ideally, my workstation would monitor my presence and disable input
and output during periods of my absence.  Realistically, a mechanism
which would activate xlock--or equivalent--after some timeout period
would acceptable.  But to work well, the systems I'm connected to
would have to know that idleness on my connections to them is OK,
unlike connections from terminals or devices without such a mechanism. 

So, the way I see it, idle daemons may not be *impossible*, but they
sure are nontrivial.  And I have yet to see one that works right.

-- 
Dave Sill (de5 at ornl.gov)
Martin Marietta Energy Systems
Workstation Support