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