cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon) (08/31/89)
In article <8908291936.AA29762@aurel.caltech.edu> bfox@aurel.caltech.edu writes: > From: George Young <young@vlsi.ll.mit.edu> > It would be helpful to have an 'autologout' timer, set by some variable. > ... > I know this is only effective if one is sitting at a shell prompt, > >Why? It could just be based on idle time. I have yet to see an idle daemon that really works. The ones I've tried (and I have tried some) have always ended up kicking people off while they're in the middle of editing. Some programs read and write to /dev/tty and don't update the modification time on the terminal. People using the most popular screen editor round here appear to be idle all the time they're in it, no matter how fast you're typing. The only record in the process structure of how idle a process is has a very low limit (2 min ?) after which it is just considered idle, so even chasing down the process tree is not good enough. > but lots of people leave a terminal sitting at a shell prompt for > days (or weeks!). > >So what? They are not taking any cycles by just sitting there. But they are leaving themselves open to attack. I would like an autologout feature, I do use tcsh's and I have modified csh here to timeout in the same way (I've also modified the action of them both so that they give a warning "press return to stay logged in" and redraw the input line 2/3rds of the way through the timeout period). This is not a means of restriction, but some form of protection for the new or forgetful user. New users get it set for them in their default .cshrc. They can disable it by unsetting a variable. They can suspend it temporarily by typing `cat', and then ^D when they've finished whatever they were doing. Rob -- UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!warwick!cudcv PHONE: +44 203 523037 JANET: cudcv@uk.ac.warwick ARPA: cudcv@warwick.ac.uk Rob McMahon, Computing Services, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, England