Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!ATHENA.MIT.EDU!jik
From: jik@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: A "fix" for wall.
Message-ID: <8903292125.AA27595@BINKLEY.MIT.EDU>
Date: 29 Mar 89 21:25:58 GMT
References: <cYAGvez0-cs24qJGFs@icase>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 26


   Date: Wed, 29 Mar 89 14:30:50 -0500 (EST)
   From: Tom Crockett <tom@icase.edu>
   References: <8903290045.aa18749@SPARK.BRL.MIL>

   Can you achieve the same effect (i.e., avoiding unwanted "wall"
   messages) by starting xterm with the -ut option to prevent it from
   writing a record in utmp?

This can cause problems in certain environments that need to know when
someone is logged into the machine and use utmp to figure that out.
For example, at Project Athena the workstations periodically
"deactivate" to flush NFS connections and do some other cleanup, and
the daemon which controls deactivation decides when to deactivate by
checking if there is anybody in utmp and deactivating when it is empty
for five minutes.

If you login to a workstation to pop up an xterm on another display,
and then logout of that workstation, you may find the workstation
getting deactivated right under you (This is a Bad Thing :-) if you
tell xterm not to put an entry for you in utmp.

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
MIT Project Athena				410 Memorial Drive, No. 223F
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU				Cambridge, MA 02139-4318
Office: 617-253-4261			      Home: 617-225-8218