Autologout of unused terminals

[Evren Senol]

At Washington University in St. Louis, we have a computer room with over
50 terminals for engineering students' use.  The room is open 24 hours a day,
7 days a week.  There is actually a process running on the machines that 
can be accessed from those terminals for autologout of idle terminals.

I think that for terminals that are accessible to a large number of people,
such as the terminals in the above mentioned room, an autologout feature is
most appropriate.  Among the reasons for this are:

1. Sometimes students leave the terminals idle for a long time, thus make it
  inaccessible to those curtious students who would not log them out and use
  the terminal.  Autologout would permit them to do so, and place the
  blame to the system.

2. The processors used by students are usually very loaded.  Unused
terminals tie up tty ports and increase the response time of a time shared
systems used.  Thus autologout is a good idea in this case as well.


Evren Senol...