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mniess
Asked: 2014-11-07 10:08:28 +0800 CST

How can I log out idle users?

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I have some kiosk PCs that pretty much work like the Ubuntu guest session. The kiosk users home has a union filesystem mounted on top of it so the can't change anything but can still save files while working at the machine (and take them with them using a USB key).

Users sometimes leave the stations with private stuff still on the desktop. Because of that I want them logged out after - say - 10 minutes of inactivity (the union file system will be emptied on logout).

Any ideas if there is an existing solution (autolog only logs the user out of active terminal sessions).

users

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Frustrated with autolog, I wrote my own script too. It's on Github.

    • It's general enough for multiple users, on X sessions and TTYs.
    • I have included an Upstart job, assuming that the script is placed at /usr/bin/idlekiller

    To set it up:

    sudo apt-get install xprintidle
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/murukeshm/scratchpad/master/linux/idlekiller/idlekiller.conf -O /etc/init/idlekiller.conf
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/murukeshm/scratchpad/master/linux/idlekiller/idlekiller -O /usr/bin/idlekiller
sudo service idlekiller start
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  2. I wrote my own script to do this. There is a tool called xprintidle that gives you the idle time of an xsession. You need to install it first

    sudo apt-get install xprintidle

    Then create the script, for example in /root/bin/idle_check.sh:

    #!/bin/sh

DISPLAY=:0
TIMEOUT=600000 # 10min = 10 * 60 * 1000

if [ $(xprintidle) -gt $TIMEOUT ]; then
    notify-send -t 60000 -i system-shutdown-panel-restart -u critical "WARNING" \
        "This machine looks idle and will be logged out in 60s.\nTo prevent this, move the mouse!"
    sleep 60;
    if [ $(xprintidle) -gt $TIMEOUT ]; then
        pkill -u matthias
    fi
fi

    I opened roots crontab to make it check every minute

    sudo -i
crontab -e

    and have it look like this

    SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/X11
*/1 * * * *   /root/bin/check_idle.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

    Works like a charm.

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