[lug] Auto logout

[John Karns]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, rm at fabula.de said:

> On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 03:34:19PM +0100, rm at fabula.de wrote:
> > [...]
> >    basically kills a X-using programs the user currently has running
>                     ^
> 		    all
>
> As an addendum: this is more of a semantic problem than a
> technical problem. Maybe, instead of asking us _what_ to do you
> could tell us _why_ you need something. Are you affraid of wasting
> expensive CPU cycles or similar resources? Then the answer would
> be: don't bother, Linux will move inactive applications to swap
> anyway. Or do you want to safe energy ? ACPI would be a place to
> llok at. Or is it a security concern? Then i'd suggest a X screen-
> saver that has password protection.

I've been looking for an auto logout under KDE as well.  In my situation I
have several diskless LTSP clients where guest users just get up and leave
the machine, and it sits there consuming server resources - open files &
processes - and uses a quiescent bw of about 3k on the LAN until it gets
logged out to the xdm screen at which time the bw goes to zero (or nominal
zero).

I've found a couple of scripts which get me close, but not exactly.  In my
particular case I also have the situation where the browser / java vm
hangs so the processes involved need to be killed.  Meanwhile the person
logged in on the client has likely opened another instance of the browser,
so the kill script should be able to distinguish between those cases.

One of the scripts I found uses xscreensaver as a wedge and parses the
process table for those sessions where the screensaver has activated, then
kills that login.  That's a bit of a rough decription, as I haven't really
analysed the script carefully (nor implemented it) yet.  The URL for that
script pkg is: http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/kiosk-reset

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net