[ale] too many logins
Todor Fassl
fassl.tod at gmail.com
Tue Nov 11 18:04:50 EST 2014
Yeah, I guess I was looking for a miracle. A combination of all these
things will probably do the trick. Really, just disabling the list of
recent logins will be good enough. I don't think anybody will object to
that either. It didn't occur to me to do that because all of the
machines in the department are identical and the profs would object if
they had to type in their user id each time. But I think I can disable
it just for the lab machines easily enough.
I should probably make it difficult for an end user to reboot these
machines. I haven't done that because when they lock up the machine with
a bad piece of code, I don't want them comeing to me. I'm not sure how
effective that will be anyway. I have nagios configured to send a wake
on LAN packet if someone turns a machine off. One day, nagios kept
telling me that a machine was down. I went down there and someone had
unplugged it and set the power strip on the table next to the machine. I
guess they really wanted that machine off and to stay off.
In a way, I thought it was kind of funny. The student must have been
turning the machine off only to have it keep coming back on all by itself.
On 11/11/2014 01:15 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Teach people how to use screen/tmux for their long running console jobs.
> Teach them nohup for when they get autologged out (see below)
>
> +1 disable user name display as mentioned earlier
> +1 disable non-root power control as earlier
>
> #set a5 min timeout policyfor bash shell
> TMOUT=300
> readonly TMOUT
> export TMOUT
>
>
> set up the above in /etc/profile and users can't change it locally.
>
> Setup a cluster aware job control process like gridengine and kill off
> local console access for all but one head node.
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com
> <mailto:bugyatl at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Disable shutdown-reboot for non root users maybe !
>
>
> On Tuesday, November 11, 2014, Todor Fassl <fassl.tod at gmail.com
> <mailto:fassl.tod at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> The biggest problem is that the login screen gets crowded with
> the names of other users who have logged in recently. Students
> don't see the box to enter a different user ID so they reboot
> the machine which kills off any matlab or sage jobs somebody
> else might have started. After a reboot, the login screen has
> maybe one or two names on it. There must be some fairly complex
> algorithm for determining who gets on that list because I cannot
> see a pattern.
>
>
>
> On 11/11/2014 12:15 PM, Ed Cashin wrote:
>
> I was reading kind of fast, but I'm not sure you pointed out any
> specific ill effects. I'd expect the kernel to page to disk
> the pages
> in RAM associated with the unused sessions. So once all the
> matlab
> state (etc.) is on the swap partition, there'd be little
> cost associated
> with a stale login as long as you have plenty of swap
> space. Maybe
> everything is already fine now?
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Todor Fassl
> <fassl.tod at gmail.com
> <mailto:fassl.tod at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Suggestions?
>
>
>
>
> On 11/11/2014 10:47 AM, JD wrote:
>
> Is there a question?
>
> On 11/11/2014 11:32 AM, Todor Fassl wrote:
>
> I have a problem in a lab I am responsible for.
> The lab has
> 7 debian stable
> machines. Students log in to check mail, browse
> the web,
> etc. But they
> frequently walk away without logging out. Soon
> enough, the
> screen saver comes on
> and the next person sits down and logs in as
> another user.
> Often, the first
> person comes back hours late or the next day
> and logs in a
> second time. Some of
> these machines have the same user logged in 5
> or 6 times.
>
> The problem is that some of these students
> start matlab,
> sage, or magma jobs
> before they walk away from the workstation.
> Those are
> legitimate jobs and should
> not be killed. In fact, sometimes students ssh
> to these
> machines and run
> computations. It's kind of a bad idea but I'd
> rather not
> tell them not to do
> that. Otherwise, I'd just have the machines reboot
> themselves every night.
>
> We used to use a tool called timeoutd but it
> seems to have
> been removed from the
> debian stable and ubuntu archives. I was never
> able to get
> it to work right
> anyway. Students would complain that their jobs
> had been
> killed or that they
> were logged out while they were typing away. At
> the same
> time, I could see that
> other users were still logged in after
> days/weeks of
> inactivity. I am not sure
> the problem really was with timeoutd because
> finger often
> gave me weird
> results.I'm not sure linux was giving timeoutd
> correct data
> to work with.
>
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> --
> Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net
> <mailto:ecashin at noserose.net>>
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> James P. Kinney III
> ////
> ////Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What
> you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on
> his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
> - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
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