Idletimeout patch

[Nicolas Williams]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 05:19:19PM +0300, Jani Jaakkola wrote:
> uOn Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Pekka Savola wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Markus Friedl wrote:
> > > but how large is the benefit/line ratio for this patch?
> >
> > Also, what's the benefit when compared to e.g. tcsh 'autologout' variable?
> 
> As I said before, not all ssh sessions have a tty and not all ssh sessions
> actually even have a shell. In our environment we are tunneling imap
> traffic through ssh with a command like
> 'ssh mail-server "exec /etc/rimapd"' where there is no shell left after
> the exec.  Also tcsh:s autologout does not work, if the user is running
> any program in the session instead of a plain shell (which users most
> of the time do, since nobody is interested in plain shell access).

You could use the command= auth_keys option to force the interposition
of a process which enforces a timeout.

This would work, but it would also badly affect performance since you'd
now have this process, with so little value to add, doubling the number
of context switches and [probably] doubling the number of data copies
that would be involved without the idle timeout process.

It's really much better to have this feature in OpenSSH.

> I am also aware that telnet and rlogin do not have this functionality. But
> since we do have the far superior ssh, we have disabled those services
> and I don't need to implement idletimeout for them.

Other SSHs have it...

> - Jani


Nico
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