topic Re: How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ? in Operating System - OpenVMS

How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

Neelmani Pandey — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:52:24 GMT

How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

Re: How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

RBrown_1 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:06:33 GMT

VMS does not have anything to do this. You will need something to do it for you. In the past there were products available to kill idle processes, rather than just lock them down.

Two names that come to mind are Hitman and Silver Bullet. Silver Bullet might have been on a DECUS tape, so you would have the source to fool with.

Digital declined to create such a product and said it was easy to create your own.

The hard part is deciding what your criteria are. If the user is running something in a subprocess, then the parent process may be idle. Etc.

Re: How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

RBrown_1 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:12:37 GMT

A previous discussion here on this topic:

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=813797

Re: How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

John Gillings — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:03:11 GMT

To safely identify and lock character cell terminal sessions on OpenVMS you need the code in your application, timing out the main event loop.

There are many ways to TRY to get it right from an external process, but all have various potentially nasty side effects.

Windowed environments can rely on screen lock, but you implement that on the display device, not OpenVMS.

Re: How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

Thomas Ritter — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:14:28 GMT

We have been using a product called KBLOCK for the last 10 years.

Re: How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

Neelmani Pandey — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:07:16 GMT

I have seen the environment where terminal session automatically gets locked after some interval provided the system is idle.

So What I assumpt that they would have modified loginout.exe for this change.

Re: How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

John Gillings — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:14:20 GMT

>So What I assumpt that they would have
>modified loginout.exe for this change

Extremely unlikely. The usual mechanism is a process that polls the system for processes that appear to be idle and kills them.

>where terminal session automatically gets
>locked after some interval provided the system
>is idle.

What does a "locked terminal" look like?