Idle Users

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 06:06:56PM -0400, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> Well, I've seen cases where people claim they've been having problems
> caused by people clicking "x" instead of exiting, and I have seen that
> the telnet session is still alive.  (A "who" still shows it logged in,
> and "ps" shows everything still running.)  Now, if these were actually
> leftovers from "x"ing out, or caused by a connection reset instead, I
> can't say.  But, I have seen it often enough that I find it hard to
> believe that they're all connection resets.  (They always claim that
> users are "x"ing out, not that they are mysteriously disconnected.
> Now, back in dialup days, dropped connections were more prevalent.)

If you drop a session to a host, and either a) that host's telnetd
isn't configured to send keepalives, or b) the host doesn't send any
characters to the (now missing) client, then *the host will never
notice that the session has fallen over*.  You only get 'connection
reset by peer' when you try to *talk*.

So yeah, you could end up there; if it troubles you, find your
keepalives and turn them on -- while noting that you lose some useful
error recovery functionality that way.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
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                2004 Stanley Cup Champion Tampa Bay Lightning