Autologout of unused terminals

Bjorn Engsig bengsig at orcenl.uucp
Fri Dec 2 18:45:07 AEST 1988


(I was the person originally requesting the autologout)

In article <17667 at adm.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at BRL.MIL (VLD/VMB) writes:
> [ ... ]  A small reward would be quietly given to
> the snitch and administrative action (perhaps a fine) would be
> taken against the offender.
That might work in your organization, but it would do no good here!
> 
> Then the TMOUT (or TIMEOUT) feature has already been mentioned; it
> provides a much better controlled way to terminate forgotten
> terminal connections, and has the important feature that IT CAN BE
> DISABLED by the user who knows that it would cause him problems.
Correct, and wrong:  Timeout needs to be implemented in whatever "shell"
all users could possibly be using.  In our environment this could be
a real shell (sh, csh, etc.) or it could be a menuing system, another
command interpreter, or something else.  And if you want to disable autologout,
a signal(SIGHUP,...) or nohup would do perfectly well.


-- 
Bjorn Engsig, ORACLE Europe      \ /    "Hofstaedter's Law:  It always takes
 ..!uunet!mcvax!orcenl!bengsig    X      longer than you expect, even if you
phone:  +31 21 59 56 411         / \     take into account Hofstaedter's Law"



More information about the Comp.unix.wizards mailing list