[seul-edu] Two Qs for a lab: X idle logout, Netscape reaper

["Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com>]

A couple questions from a high school lab with freestanding terminals:

 1. Is there any way to set an idle timeout in X to disconnect a session
    after some point in time?  I'm not sure this is the preferred
    solution as the default use period (about 50 minutes during the
    school day) may be inappropriate for use outside normal hours.

    Alternatives that come to mind are simply to use
    <ctrl><alt><backspace> to kill an active session if found.

    Otherwise, launching a scheduled job to "reap" a terminal if it's
    found idled or just at some future time might be useful (though not
    if it reaps another user's session.

 2. The lab uses Netscape for web browsing.  This results in numerous
    problems, most signficantly the existence of persistent disconnected
    Netscape sessions (apparantly related to use of Java) which continue
    running.

    Ideally you'd want a reaper to run when a session is closed, but I
    don't know of a way to do this, unless the last two lines of your
    /etc/X11/Xsession file run the window manager, then the Netscape
    reaper, respectively.
    
    The alternative would be to run the reaper when the next session is
    started.

Thoughts appreciated.

Thanks.

-- 
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