w8sdz@smoke.BRL.MIL (Keith Petersen) (06/26/89)
I've been asked to try to locate an idle terminal daemon for TACOM's 98x running OSx4.4c. Some forgetful users are leaving their terminals logged in overnight or over the weekend. Pointers would be appreciated. Keith -- Keith Petersen Maintainer of SIMTEL20's CP/M, MSDOS, and MISC archives Internet: w8sdz@WSMR-SIMTEL20.Army.Mil [26.2.0.74] Uucp: {ames,decwrl,harvard,rutgers,ucbvax,uunet}!wsmr-simtel20.army.mil!w8sdz
karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (06/26/89)
We use the "untamo" package for our idle-terminal killer. It appears to have come across the net in comp.sources.unix Volume 7, Dec 1986. --Karl
sandel@SW.MCC.COM (Charles Sandel) (06/27/89)
A few years ago I wrote exactly such a thing, called the 'assassin'. Below is a description of it from a mail message I sent out. I haven't made it work on the Pyramid yet, but it shouldn't be too hard. Let me know if you are interested. I will send you the source. Charles Thank you for your interest in the assassin. The response from the net was much greater than I anticipated, and has taken me a bit by surprise (though a pleasant one!). Let me describe the current state of the assassin: It has been running with much success on a VAX 780 (originally running 4.2BSD, now running 4.3BSD) for over a year. I have just recently been working on running it at another site (a 750 running 4.2) which has a very different configuration, and which has therefore exposed some deficiencies in the code (mostly with the DMF support, which I didn't have at the previous site). These are solvable, however, and I expect to have it fully functional on this machine within the next week or so. The motivation behind the assassin was that we had a MICOM port contention system, lots of users, a limited number of VAX ports and I needed a good intelligent way of knocking people of when they were not doing anything in order to give someone else a shot at a port. I also had users (Astronomers) who tended to have very long-running number-crunching processes which would eat up cycles and destroy the time-sharing performance. In the process of writing the assassin code, it became very natural to do the code for re-nicing. The idea behind the re-nicing is this: you designate a period of "prime-time", e.g., 8:00am-5:00pm. You also specify a threshhold (in seconds of CPU time) above which a process is elligible for renicing. Then, based on the seconds of accumulated CPU time of the process and the current load average of the machine, the assassin will re-nice the process (by N increments of "nice" for each S seconds of CPU time above the threshhold; N and S are settable by you). After the "prime time" period ends, the assassin puts all processes it has touched back to their *original* nice. There is also the capability to specify users, process-names and ttys to ignore (i.e., do not renice those). This is just a brief overview of what it does. It also has a built-in capability to plug in different re-nicing algorithms other than the one described above. The daemon has a configuration file (ala termcap) which determines its actions. There are compiled-in defaults, almost all of which are changeable via the config file. The daemon reconfigures itself when the config file changes. The daemon can stay around continuously, waking up periodically, or it can be run from cron(8). There is also the capability to plug in different pause algorithms. Since you are primarily interested in the re-nicing features, I will not describe the idle-login killing procedure here. Unfortunately, I have not written any documentation for the assassin, because just after I completed it a year ago, I changed jobs and haven't had the chance to write any since. Unfortuately also, I do not have a good package ready to distribute which should include instructions, etc. The assassin is very flexible and configurable and the code is commented. However, without a guide to installing it, it could become confusing. I am making time to work on it, however, and hope to have an installation guide ready soon. The crux of the matter is that I still consider it in "beta" test mode, since it is just now starting on its second machine. But since it has been running for a year, I expect this second incarnation to go smoothly. I do not want to distribute it until it is fairly stable on the second machine. So much for disclaimers. What you really want to hear is how to get it. Here is a laundry list of related things: 1) There will be no charge for distributions over USENET/UUCP. If I have to make you a tape for some reason, I will ask you for a tape in return and for you to pay postage. 2) It runs *only* on 4.2/4.3. Some people have expressed interest in a System V version. That would be a *major* rewriting effort, since the whole strategy behind the assassin is based on many Berkeley-isms. 3) In order not to re-invent the wheel, the assassin incorporates some Berkeley source code (mostly from ps(1)), which, unfortunately, will require proof of a Berkeley license before I can give you the source code (although, if you are really interested, and don't have a Berkeley source license, we can discuss getting you a binary; no guarantees, though!). 4) As mentioned above, it is still in "beta" test mode, so if you still want it, you must be willing to suffer the problems inherent in this, *AND* you must agree to send back to me any bug reports *AND FIXES* that you find. Again, however, it has been running for a year without major mishaps. 5) To date, I've only tried running it on VAXen 780 & 750. However, I have a Pyramid here and *LOTS* of Suns that I want to make it work on. If you have other machines (785's, 8600's, Sequents, Convex, CCI, etc) that run 4.2/4.3, I'd be very interested in getting your help to make it work there. Lastly, I just had an Eagle die on me so the next few days I won't have any time whatsoever to spend on the assassin or distributing it. So it will be at least a week before I can get around to shipping it out. After all this, if you are still interested, (and I sincerely hope that you are!), please mail me proof of Berkeley source license. (This is a hassle I'd rather not deal with, and if you have any suggestions about ways around the legalities, I'd be glad to hear them.) But for right now, I don't think I want the legal entanglements of giving away copyrighted Berkeley code, so send me a copy of your license. After I receive the license copy, I will put together a package to distribute to people who agree to be beta test sites. After the beta test sites run it for awhile and it appears stable, I would like to distribute it more widely. My US Mail address for the Berkeley license: Charles Sandel MCC Software Technology 9430 Research Blvd Austin, Texas 78756 Phone: (512) 834-3498 Electronic addresses: ARPA: sandel@mcc.ARPA USENET: ....!ut-sally!im4u!milano!sandel Please let me know if you are still interested. Thanx!
ewan@etive.ed.ac.uk (Gould UK Support) (06/27/89)
In article <KARL.89Jun26105618@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: >We use the "untamo" package for our idle-terminal killer. It appears >to have come across the net in comp.sources.unix Volume 7, Dec 1986. > >--Karl We use this program at Encore Computer, but noticed one very irritating bug - it doesnt work if a user has an 8 character username. The fix is avaliable on request.