[ale] too many logins

[Ed Cashin]

I was reading kind of fast, but I'm not sure you pointed out any specific
ill effects.  I'd expect the kernel to page to disk the pages in RAM
associated with the unused sessions.  So once all the matlab state (etc.)
is on the swap partition, there'd be little cost associated with a stale
login as long as you have plenty of swap space.  Maybe everything is
already fine now?

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Todor Fassl <fassl.tod at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
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