I got a lot of responses very quickly. Thanks to all who responded. It
seems that this question was asked a little while back, before I found
this list. Most responses contained what the following article does,
which was forwarded by Clifford Krieger. Thanks Clifford for passing this
along.
I asked a similar question about 2 months ago. I wanted to kill off idle
processes. You may find my answers useful, then again mabey not.
-cliff
Set environmental variables:
csh and tcsh
set autologout=60
where 60 represents the number of minutes if inactivity.
ksh and bash
TMOUT=3600 ; export TMOUT
where 3600 represents the number of seconds of inactivity.
Worth of note, but I am dealing with sophisticated users who would disable
this in a heart beat.
Comercial products:
Computronics sells a product called Logmon that analyzes cpu usage to
establish inactivity. This apperantly prevents eroneous logoffs during
long operations. I received one sales pitch and one testominal. It sounds
like a good product, but perhaps more than we need since we are looking at
a 5 day time-out interval.
use idletime:
idletime is a nifty little perl script writtne by Kent Arnott.
See
http://www.tamucc.edu/~karnott/idletime.html for a copy.
Kent deserves special praise for his selfless assistance in answering a few
questions I had. Had idletime not come along, I would have used his
product.
use idlekiller:
idlekiller is used by my alma mater, GMU. It was written by Phil Farrell
of Stanford. I found it to be available at most of the Linux ftp sites
including
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Admin/idle
Richard Jackson of GMU had some reservations about its efficency because it
makes extensive use of awk, but then again, I am not running a system with
20,000+ students.
use idled:
Ken Brown recommended this program. It is a daemon process that is
extremely versital. It can be configured on the fly. The only problem is
with notifying users on DUx systems prior to killing the process.
Apperantly DEC has a small problem that cause the notice to be sent, but
then the process isn't killed. I seem to recall that there is a patch for
wall, but I haven't tried idled with that. I just took the recommended
approach and disabled the feature.
This program is fantastic. It compiled on the first try. It commes with a
sample configuration file that has about 10 lines of configureation and
about 200 of comments. It comes with configureations for most of the
common systems. It can be confiured to base its decisions on I/O or user
input. You can vary the privledges among different groups. And finally,
it seems to get regular updates.
I have compiled an run the daemon on 3.0, 3.2-3, and 3.2c systems. My
next target is HP-UX 10.01.
More information can be had at:
http://www.cs.hope.edu/~crider/idled/
-cliff
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darryl Cook | e-mail -- pgmr_at_ppalf.appstate.edu
Applications Programmer II | phone -- (704)-262-3190 x107
Appalachian State University | fax -- (704)-262-4017
265 Dale Street |
Boone, NC 28608 |
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Received on Thu Aug 15 1996 - 21:14:51 NZST