Autologout of unused terminals

[Christopher Lott]

In article <3603 at jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall at jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:
>Not only that, but idle-killers are so easy to spoof, unless you disable
>people from executing utime() or ioctl().
>Larry Wall
>lwall at jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov

Well, yes.  A friend (Hi, Ed) did so once; was nothing more than writing a
little daemon to spit out a newline character using a 4.2BSD ioctl() call
every IDLE_TIMEOUT_PERIOD - 1 minutes. 

But the reason I have put untamo, from Purdue cc, on our largish timeshare
machine here was to free up precious hardwire lines to the campus network
switch.  Allows more people to have access.

I maintain that people are slightly flaky at times (me especially) and do
forget to log out - so a daemon that cleans up after them is more of a help
than a detriment to the sysadmin effort.  Putting the daemon to work is
not a battle between the stodgy sysadmin and the clever, crafty user but
merely another effort to allocate resources more fairly.

[ Untamo allows nice exceptions - we never time-out a user on a pty, only
  on a hardwire line.  My xterm client on that machine tends to go idle for
  long periods, but pseudo terminals are relatively cheap, so it's ok. ]

I have no affiliation with untamo and authors except as a user.

chris... 

-=-
cml at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu   Computer Science Department, OSU     614-292-6546
 or:  ...!{att,pyramid,killer}!osu-cis!cml		<standard disclaimers>