escaping idle users back to menu

[Rkreiss@verizon.net]]

To post from phone:

When session times out it goes to a log in screen.

Most of the time it is not tbat someone left but got distracted by a phone call or question.

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2011 5:33 PM
To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
Subject: Re: escaping idle users back to menu

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011, Fairlight wrote:
>Simon--er, no...it was Richard Kreiss--said:
>> The problem my client has is that they have many employees working remotely
>> through terminal server.  As they are working at client sites, they
>> sometimes get distracted and their session times out and disconnects.  In
>
>"Turn off session timeouts."

There are some systems that lock/lose the session after a period
of inactivity.  This usually is something in the border router.
On *nix xterm sessions where this is a problem I normally run
"top" or a ping to keep some activity on the line.

>Problem solved.
>
>> One other problem arose which we just discovered and fp support does not
>> understand why this should be a problem.  On the terminal server machine,
>> c:\fptemp is where fptmp is set.  Over the last 5 years for one reason or
>> another, there were somewhere between 1500 and 1600 files left in this
>> directory.  The other day, every time someone tried to access the
>> market_memo file, the system locked up and the session had to be closed by
>> clicking on the <X> in the window.  After these files were cleared out, the
>> programs have worked properly.  A task has been added to run at 1AM on
>> Sunday when no one will be in the system.
>
>Sounds like treating the symptoms rather than the disease.  You should
>really stop randomly deleting files and fix the cause of their being left
>there in the first place.

When people run Windows clients, abnormal exits are something one
has to live with.

On the other hand, it can be a major security problem if people
leave terminal sessions open unattended.

>> As for rebuilding auto indexes, it makes sense if an index has gone bad for
>> some reason and all work has to stop to rebuild the index Especially if the
>> work day runs from 8:30 AM EST to 9PM PST.
>
>I know people that rebuild auto indexes nightly, whether they need it or
>not--simply because they -could- go bad for some mysterious reason.
>
>> PS: Still wish we had a way to exit a record that is being updated after NN
>> minutes of idle time.  Granted this becomes a messy proposition as to what
>> to do, but that is the programmer's responsibility to insure as clean an
>> exit as possible.
>
>They'd have to implement select() in the *clerk engine--something I've
>advocated since 1993, but which has never been felt necessary by TPTB.
>Luck with that.

At one point I wrote a set of wrappers that sat between the
user's terminal session and Filepro with one process handing
keyboard input, the other input from FilePro which send codes to
reprogram function keys on the Radio Shack DT-100 terminals.  Of
course the original source code wasn't available, only compiled
binaries for 80286 Xenix.  A wrapper like this could implement a
session timeout fairly easily.

Bill
-- 
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