Watchdog program

[Dan Schlitt]

In article <107 at cosumn.edu> brian at cosumn.edu (Brian Volkoff) writes:
>In article <1755 at ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM>, mercer at ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer) writes:
>> times for the real device,  /dev/ttyxx,  are not updated.  I have
>> been stung by this on our news machine.  Chronically short of space,
>> yet because of the timeout limit,  you get knocked off doing large
>> transfers.

An annoying problem for several of our users when I ran such an
animal.

>Ditto.  I found the easiest solution to the above problem was to put a
>short shell program in the background to "touch" my /dev/tty entry every
>five minutes.  

And we see that users find counter-measures anyhow.

I inherited an idle daemon when I took over here.  After listening to
the debate on the net I decided to get rid of it.  I replaced it with
a hack to csh which times out if you sit at the prompt too long.  The
timeout interval is set by an environment variable and information
about it is in the on-line man page.  (I do run the old program 3
times a day to clean out cases where people really do forget to log
out -- 6pm, midnight, and 6am.)  The disaster of tens if not hundreds
of unused logged on terminals just never happened.  And no one comes
around and wants to know why the system logged them off in the middle
of editing a file.  I'm happy with the change.

-- 
Dan Schlitt                        Manager, Science Division Computer Facility
dan at sci.ccny.cuny.edu              City College of New York
dan at ccnysci.uucp                   New York, NY 10031
dan at ccnysci.bitnet                 (212)690-6868