[seul-edu] idled - could be useful

[Jim Thomas <jthomas@bittware.com>]

I just stumbled over a daemon called idled (pronounced idle-dee) which
will monitor user activity and log them out after an extended period of
idleness.  

http://www.darkwing.com/idled/

I've not tried it yet, but it looks like it might address a problem I've
had and which I'd guess is common in a school's linux lab.

A lot of our students would leave the lab without logging off, and
sometimes without even locking their screens.  This is bad because
anyone who walks into the lab can jump on that machine and engage in
forbidden activities without the fear of being traced (it'll be traced
to the user who failed to log out instead).

Locking their screens is only marginally better - although it prevents
someone from abusing an account, it effectively disables the machine
(unless they know to clt-alt-f2, ctl-alt-del to reboot) when another
class is scheduled to be in there.

Since I adminster these machines remotely, I had taken to running "last"
on all the machines every day after school to make sure no one stayed
logged in over night, and killing their processes if they forgot to log
out.

idled works with XDM, and I'm going to find out if it'll work with kdm
too (which is what we use).  Setting the TMOUT varaible in the student's
shell would not work because our students don't use the shells (and a
savvy student could redefine his TMOUT env var to avoid the automatic
logout anyhow).

I'll let the list know how this works out (although it might take a
while, since school's out for the summer now).

-- 
Jim Thomas                            E-mail:     jthomas@bittware.com  
Senior Applications Engineer          Web:     http://www.bittware.com
Bittware, Inc                         Tel:              (703) 779-7770
Reality continues to ruin my life. - Calvin