Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!jik
From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Autologout of unused terminals
Message-ID: <8307@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 5 Dec 88 04:22:00 GMT
References: <1086@entropy.ms.washington.edu> <201.nlunix6@orcenl.uucp> <8978@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2682@sultra.UUCP> <9012@smoke.BRL.MIL> <213.nlunix6@orcenl.uucp> <9032@smoke.BRL.MIL> 
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 21

In article <1086@entropy.ms.washington.edu>, Charlie Geyer (charlie)
writes:
>UNIX doesn't just talk to dumb terminals anymore.  Maybe "Autologout
>of unused terminals" is a bad idea.  If implemented, it should come
>with an easy way that any user can defeat it, and then what's the
>point?

Well, here at Project Athena, we've had the autologout code commented
out in our /bin/csh (/bin/csh is the default shell for all of our
users, and practically no one uses any other) sources for at least a
year and a half.  When *all* the terminals on a workstation are
windows and a user may in many cases spend an hour working in an emacs
window without touching a terminal window, autologout is fatal.

Of course there was this other teeny weeny bug which caused the X
server to crash, thus logging out the user, if the user had a black
background and the screensaver kicked in... but we won't talk about
that :-)

  Jonathan Kamens
  MIT Project Athena