Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brachiosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!cml From: cml@brachiosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Christopher Lott) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Autologout of unused terminals Message-ID: <28766@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 30 Nov 88 21:23:17 GMT References: <201.nlunix6@orcenl.uucp> <8978@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2682@sultra.UUCP> <9012@smoke.BRL.MIL> <3603@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 31 In article <3603@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes: >Not only that, but idle-killers are so easy to spoof, unless you disable >people from executing utime() or ioctl(). >Larry Wall >lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov Well, yes. A friend (Hi, Ed) did so once; was nothing more than writing a little daemon to spit out a newline character using a 4.2BSD ioctl() call every IDLE_TIMEOUT_PERIOD - 1 minutes. But the reason I have put untamo, from Purdue cc, on our largish timeshare machine here was to free up precious hardwire lines to the campus network switch. Allows more people to have access. I maintain that people are slightly flaky at times (me especially) and do forget to log out - so a daemon that cleans up after them is more of a help than a detriment to the sysadmin effort. Putting the daemon to work is not a battle between the stodgy sysadmin and the clever, crafty user but merely another effort to allocate resources more fairly. [ Untamo allows nice exceptions - we never time-out a user on a pty, only on a hardwire line. My xterm client on that machine tends to go idle for long periods, but pseudo terminals are relatively cheap, so it's ok. ] I have no affiliation with untamo and authors except as a user. chris... -=- cml@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Computer Science Department, OSU 614-292-6546 or: ...!{att,pyramid,killer}!osu-cis!cml