[ale] too many logins

[JD]

Is there a question?

On 11/11/2014 11:32 AM, Todor Fassl wrote:
> I have a problem in a lab I am responsible for. The lab has 7 debian stable
> machines. Students log in to check mail, browse the web, etc. But they
> frequently walk away without logging out. Soon enough, the screen saver comes on
> and the next person sits down and logs in as another user. Often, the first
> person comes back hours late or the next day and logs in a second time. Some of
> these machines have the same user logged in 5 or 6 times.
> 
> The problem is that some of these students start matlab, sage, or magma jobs
> before they walk away from the workstation. Those are legitimate jobs and should
> not be killed.  In fact, sometimes students ssh to these machines and run
> computations. It's kind of a bad idea but I'd rather not tell them not to do
> that. Otherwise, I'd just have the machines reboot themselves every  night.
> 
> We used to use a tool called timeoutd but it seems to have been removed from the
> debian stable and ubuntu archives.  I was never able to get it to work right
> anyway. Students would complain that their jobs had been killed or that they
> were logged out while they were typing away. At the same time, I could see that
> other users were still logged in after days/weeks of inactivity. I am not sure
> the problem really was with timeoutd because finger often gave me weird
> results.I'm not sure linux was giving timeoutd correct data to work with.
>