Auto-logoff facility in Unix

[darrelj at sdcrdcf.UUCP]

We had autologoff here for a while.  The primary reason was that we have
many more users than terminal lines (typically we could keep about 30 of 32
lines busy) so people would stay logged in to avoid being stuck in a queue
to get another line later.  This line hogging only exacerbated the problem
(which could be seen by how early all 32 lines got grabbed).  It proved to
be politically unpopular to have autologoff (the situation was still worse
for a while as some of the security holes in unix let knowledgeable users
manually zap idle terminals to free the line; stty 0 still results in a
message identifying the user which is hanging up the line).  The effective
solution here was to add 8 more tty lines, virtually guaranteeing  a line
will be free at all times (and actually resulted in FEWER lines in use most
of the time -- no longer need to hog a line).
-- 
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
...{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdccsu3,trw-unix}!sdcrdcf!darrelj
VANBUER at USC-ECL.ARPA