UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hats of to all the members for providing the detailed guidence to the newbe !!

I am working on Red Hat LINUX plateform, where the number of users are
more that 50. The problem I m facing is that all the user are opening the virtual terminals and leave it unattended for hours together and it hampers the working of my Networks and slows down considerably.Can any one suggest how to control it from the SERVER side ?? Is there anything which can sort it out ??

Thanks in advance Newbe on this forum

I could think of,

using the 'w' command

and from that identify the idle time of a user-tty combination

You can use either w or finger to identify the idle logins and their idle time.
Use sys variable TMOUT to set a timeout value for a particular login

If you're using pam_limits you can restrict users and groups in various ways through /etc/security/limits.conf - for example here we see that I've restricted the maximum number of logins for members of group "groupname" to 4.

Code:

# grep pam_limits /etc/pam.d/system-auth
session     required      /lib/security/pam_limits.so
# grep '^[^#].*maxlogins' /etc/security/limits.conf 
@groupname        hard    maxlogins       4

If you're not using pam_limits , you can do something like this.

Cheers
ZB

Bundles of THANX Dear Matrixmadhan,jacoden & zazzybob

I would like to make me more clear. My main problem was how to restrict the various users from using the virtual terminals from SERVER side. By w I may get who are presently working and I may became su and kill but that creates
problems ,i.e. the particular recors which is being last held by the respective user will get locked and file becomes unusable till I restart the SERVER.

Hence I would like the clean way to restrict the users. The zazzybob's way I shall try and will inform the FORUM accordingly. Bye buddies . Thanx once again all for sparing your valuable time.