How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

[Neelmani Pandey]

How to Lock idle terminals automatically in VMS ?

[RBrown_1]

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.

[RBrown_1]

A previous discussion here on this topic:

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

[John Gillings]

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.

[Thomas Ritter]

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

[Neelmani Pandey]

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.

[John Gillings]

>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?