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From: lcc.barry@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA (Barry Gold)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Idle time logout mechanism (daemon)
Message-ID: <11635@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 17-Jul-85 09:36:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.11635
Posted: Wed Jul 17 09:36:51 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 19-Jul-85 02:09:52 EDT
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Lines: 34


	Does anyone have (or know of) a daemon which will monitor users idle
	time, and logout any user idle longer than a given amount of time.
	We have recently had troubles with too many people and not enough ports,
	especially when there are ports where people have left terminals for
	extended periods of time.

DON'T DO IT.  Try to educate your users to be more cooperative while you get
more ports.  If necessary, increase the charge for connect time.  When users'
supervisors/instructors start finding their budgets eaten up by connect time
charges for idle time, the users will get the message fast!  Maybe
$100/hour :-)

If you put in a daemon to monitor idle time, you'll just encourage your
users to write programs that make their terminals appear non-idle.  We
had such a program at SDC and it believed any terminal i/o was non-idle,
so I wrote a shell script that slept for 5 minutes and echoed a line to
the terminal, ad infinitum.  If you consider only input non-idle, people
will echo character strings to their terminals that cause the terminals
to send input (almost any crt, even "dumb" ones, will do that these
days).

The solution to inadequate computing resources is to get more resources.
If you can't afford more resources, charge enough for your computing
that you CAN get more resources.

	Please respond via mail and as usual, I will summarize for the net.

Sorry, the digestification process doesn't leave a useful return address
(moderator please note).  The following from line is not acceptable to
lcc (or ucla-cs, our arpanet relay) because they have no idea how to
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From: harold@ubvax.UUCP (Harold Cook)