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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Program to log off idle users
Message-ID: <11077:Oct1721:21:2390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 90 21:21:23 GMT
References: <9800001@hpbbi4.BBN.HP.COM> <1990Oct4.135333.19139@warwick.ac.uk> <1990Oct10.180836.12313@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
Organization: IR
Lines: 16

In article <1990Oct10.180836.12313@sci.ccny.cuny.edu> dan@sci.ccny.cuny.edu (Dan Schlitt) writes:
> What I do now that seems to work is to use a hacked version of csh
> which has a timeout if it sits at the prompt too long.

That's wrong in two ways. One is that I might want to leave a csh
running while I work at another shell. Two is that a user who leaves his
terminal with an editor running has left it completely open.

Those who say that idle daemons are impossible to do well have not
learned to distinguish between sessions and connections. An idle daemon
is something to cut short an idle *connection*. If you are connected to
a session running a window manager that uses several ttys, what should
the idle daemon kill? Each individual tty? Of course not. It's an idle
*connection*, not an idle session, that's dangerous. 

---Dan