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From: wesommer@ICARUS.mit.edu (William E. Sommerfeld)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Periodic X (xterm?) deaths
Message-ID: <1265@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 7-Aug-87 13:25:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: bloom-be.1265
Posted: Fri Aug  7 13:25:18 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Aug-87 02:54:40 EDT
References: <1856@megaron.arizona.edu> <3911@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: wesommer@ICARUS.UUCP (William E. Sommerfeld)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 29
Keywords: X death cshe autologout

In article <3911@osu-eddie.UUCP> bob@ohio-state.ARPA (Bob Sutterfield) writes:
>The cause in our case was a locally popular extended csh that had an
>autologout option that was set "on" by default.  If a cshe has no
>activity for an hour then it will exit.  For a user on a dumb terminal
>this was fine, because it meant he had walked away and forgotten to
>log out, and it solved part of the `untamo'-type problem.
>
>However, in a window system where some windows lie fallow for long
>periods of time (specifically the console xterm) it wasn't so helpful.
>So our solution is for users of cshe to "unset autologout", at least
>in the console xterm.  There are a lot fewer frustrated X users around
>here now.

Sounds familiar.  For a while, most of the terminals here at Athena
were vt100/vt220 or equivalent, wired up to timesharing 11/750's.
Someone put in the autologout option into /bin/csh (along with a bunch
of other options, such as filename completion, etc.) for their benefit.

Those who regularly used X (in general, those who knew what they were
doing) generally tripped over the autologout problem pretty early,
realized what had happened (or had it explained to them), and fixed it
by adding an "unset autologout" to their .login file.  As workstations
started to become more common, their use by naive users increased, and
there were a lot of bug reports of the form "The system just logged me
out without warning -- all my windows went away".  It was then decided
to remove this option.  The real problem was that it took a long time
for the new /bin/csh to get propagated to all the systems.

					- Bill