Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site rayssd.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!rayssd!dhb From: dhb@rayssd.UUCP (David H. Brierley) Newsgroups: net.sources Subject: Re: Re: Automatic Logout Process Message-ID: <958@rayssd.UUCP> Date: Tue, 13-Aug-85 14:17:58 EDT Article-I.D.: rayssd.958 Posted: Tue Aug 13 14:17:58 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 14-Aug-85 02:58:28 EDT References: <6@andromeda.UUCP> <264@sesame.UUCP> Sender: dhb@rayssd.UUCP (David H. Brierley @ Raytheon Co., Portsmouth RI) Organization: Raytheon Co., Portsmouth RI Lines: 37 > I would suspect that a mod to the tty driver would be appro. (Fake out > DTR/CD going inactive on timeout.) Due to the needed location, this > is highly system dependent. Please dont change the tty driver to log out idle users!!!!!!! The simplest thing that can be done is to add an enforced timeout mechanism to the shells. Obviously this is only possible if you have a source license. The changes are fairly simple and have been done by several people that I know of (myself included). A somewhat harder thing to do is to be able to log off users that simply run some program (i.e. vi) and then walk away. To do this you have to write one of the much dreaded "idle logout daemon"s. Unless you are extremely clever this is best done by modifying the source to one of the system programs like "ps" or "w". You will note that nowhere did I mention changing the tty driver, in fact I never even suggested making any changes to the kernel at all. All of this code is either in the shell or in a normal user-mode process. I will admit that we made one change to the shell and the kernel to support the "idle logout daemon" that we developed here. We added a system call to set an unused bit in the process structure and made the shell use that routine before it placed a process into the background. This way the idle checker could easily ignore background processes without having to analyze the process table entry in great detail. It makes it much nicer because it makes the idle checker more efficient and more accurate. Well, enough rambling for now. I just wanted to illustrate some of the things that can be done to force idle users off the system. -- Dave Brierley Raytheon Co.; Portsmouth RI; (401)-847-8000 x4073 ...!decvax!brunix!rayssd!dhb ...!allegra!rayssd!dhb ...!linus!rayssd!dhb