daveh@marob.masa.com (Dave Hammond) (08/08/89)
We recently had a user of our software complain that his idle-logout daemon was being confounded by our package Basically, a "clock" display was being updated once a minute, even while the user was idle, so the tty device never looked "idle". No problem -- just go into the program's "rc" file and de-install its clock. This worked fine, except now the user says "...working in one of the applications (WordPerfect, etc.) gives us the problem of showing the user being idle in the process accounting table, when there is actually work going on and keys are pressed...". He goes on to suggest that our package "is not updating the system process accounting correctly". Several questions arise: 1. My understanding of process accounting is that all a user process can do is enable or disable accounting, and that you had to be running suid(root) to do so. Further, the accounting relates to fork/exec activity, not tty i/o activity. Am I missing some obvious way that a process "updates" the system accounting tables? 2. Does WordPerfect run on native Xenix, or does it require Vpix ? If Vpix is in the loop, are there situations where vpix may not run corrected (eg, from a vi :! command prompt) ? Any info would be appreciated. -- Dave Hammond daveh@marob.masa.com