[ale] too many logins

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Tue Nov 11 14:15:13 EST 2014


Teach people how to use screen/tmux for their long running console jobs.
Teach them nohup for when they get autologged out (see below)

+1 disable user name display as mentioned earlier
+1 disable non-root power control as earlier

# set a 5 min timeout policy for bash shellTMOUT=300readonly TMOUTexport TMOUT


set up the above in /etc/profile and users can't change it locally.

Setup a cluster aware job control process like gridengine and kill off
local console access for all but one head node.

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com> wrote:

> Disable shutdown-reboot for non root users maybe !
>
>
> On Tuesday, November 11, 2014, Todor Fassl <fassl.tod at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The biggest problem is that the login screen gets crowded with the names
>> of other users who have logged in recently. Students don't see the box to
>> enter a different user ID so they reboot the machine which kills off any
>> matlab or sage jobs somebody else might have started. After a reboot, the
>> login screen has maybe one or two names on it. There must be some fairly
>> complex algorithm for determining who gets on that list because I cannot
>> see a pattern.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11/11/2014 12:15 PM, Ed Cashin wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>> <mailto: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 <mailto:ecashin at noserose.net>>
>>>
>>>
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>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain


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