Autologout of unused terminals

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <1086 at entropy.ms.washington.edu>, Charlie Geyer (charlie)
writes:
>UNIX doesn't just talk to dumb terminals anymore.  Maybe "Autologout
>of unused terminals" is a bad idea.  If implemented, it should come
>with an easy way that any user can defeat it, and then what's the
>point?

Well, here at Project Athena, we've had the autologout code commented
out in our /bin/csh (/bin/csh is the default shell for all of our
users, and practically no one uses any other) sources for at least a
year and a half.  When *all* the terminals on a workstation are
windows and a user may in many cases spend an hour working in an emacs
window without touching a terminal window, autologout is fatal.

Of course there was this other teeny weeny bug which caused the X
server to crash, thus logging out the user, if the user had a black
background and the screensaver kicked in... but we won't talk about
that :-)

  Jonathan Kamens
  MIT Project Athena