Preventing Idle in telnet

Chris Torek chris at mimsy.umd.edu
Fri Sep 28 09:33:38 AEST 1990


In article <2239 at charon.cwi.nl> dik at cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:
>This is all based on a few assumptions that are all wrong ....

I agree.  I have been forced to implement `idle timeouts' occasionally,
and I have always made them easy to defeat, because they are too often
wrong.  Even if you make them difficult to defeat, people will eventually
defeat them---and then those `legitimately idle' will be doing extra
work and those `illegitimately idle' will not be caught anyway.

(What we have now on the CS department machines is an `idle warning'
mail-generator that scans dialups and sends mail only.  If someone is
perpetually idle we use administrative action to fix it.)
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 405 2750)
Domain:	chris at cs.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris



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