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