[ale] too many logins

[Todor Fassl]

Suggestions?



On 11/11/2014 10:47 AM, JD wrote:
> 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.
>>
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