Remotely Force Logout of other Users?

CoolAJ86 · 04-14-2005, 09:21 AM

Is there any sort of standard utility for forcing a user to logoff as root?

Say Jane logs in remotely and her connection is dropped but she still has processes that are running. Sometimes when Jane logs back in she gets errors when trying to restart the processes which are already running but 'orphaned' so to speak.

Specifically, I'm using LTSP and everytime a PC is shut off before a user logs out it creates a mess of problems. I can create a bash script and run it in a cron job, but I was hoping some feature to handle this sort of thing had already been thought of and handled with some standard utility.

masand · 04-14-2005, 09:53 AM

hey i am working on a project like this

http://masand.sourceforge.net

CoolAJ86 · 04-14-2005, 10:25 AM

coolie, I'll check it out from time to time.

For my purposes I guess I'll just be using this script for now...

Code:

/usr/local/bin/loguseroff:

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -n "${1}" ]; then
        echo "USAGE: ${0} username"
        exit 1
fi

USER_EXISTS=`cat /etc/passwd | grep ${1}`
if [ ! -n "${USER_EXISTS}" ]; then
        echo "That username is not in /etc/passwd"
        exit 1
fi

if [ "${1}" = "root" ]; then
        echo "Are you stupid or something? Been there, done that, BAD IDEA!"
        exit 1
fi

ps -U ${1} -u ${1} h --format pid | while read PID
do
        PID=`echo "${PROCESS}" | cut -f1`
done

sleep 10

ps -U ${1} -u ${1} h --format pid | while read PID
do
        kill -9 ${PID}
done

exit 0

Crashed_Again · 04-14-2005, 10:27 AM

Wouldn't it be easier just to kill the users shell with a signal 9?

masand · 04-14-2005, 10:28 AM

that script might not purge all process i think
because i used to get se remaining processes

regards

unSpawn · 04-16-2005, 06:51 AM

If shell equals Bash, then you could globally set 'shopt -q -s huponexit'. A more constructive way for ppl to run cmdline jobs would be to use screen on login. When you've been thrown out of a session you can just login again and re-attach to a session.

//OT: for USER_EXISTS=`cat /etc/passwd | grep ${1}` you could turn to just using exit status, loose the cat usage doing 'grep -qie "$1" /etc/password' or even 'getent passwd "$1"' and the whole ps/kill thing may be shorter as pkill -U "$1"...