login session timeout

[Jeganathan Venkitasamy]

Hi,

can anyone tell me how to set up inactivity time out for user sessions in HP-UX 11.0?

Thanks & regards,
Jegi
NBC

[Chris Calabrese · Accepted solution]

There's no general purpose mechanism I know of that works in all situations, but putting
TMOUT=seconds; export TMOUT
in /etc/profile will set the shell-level timeout for all users of sh or ksh to . 1800 would be a typical value.

[Bill Hassell]

And for csh users, the variable is autologout and the units are in minutes. To force users to adhere to the TMOUT value (ksh, POSIX, bash) you can put this statement into /etc/profile:

export readonly TMOUT=14400

which forces every login shell to timeout in 4 hours or no activity. Note this also affects root's login and once set to readonly, the value in the shell cannot be changed, even by root. It's often common to set root's timeout to less than an hour to avoid open sessions on an open terminal or console.

Note that this timeout only counts time when the shell is idle. If a smart user starts another shell or perhaps a copy of vi, the timer will not run and the 'session' will never timeout.