Aucbvax.1731 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!CSVAX.mark@Berkeley Sun Jun 14 13:19:06 1981 Re: idle job killer An idle job uses up a port, which is a scarce resource on a surprising number of systems. Not just dialups, but those contended for by various kinds of port switchers and networks, are affected. I have worked in such environments, and found them very painful. Often job killers are installed, and I have seen people go to great lengths to get around the job killer, because they don't want to lose their port when they, say, go to lunch (it will be hard to get another). It is not hard to write a program to fool such a daemon. Another resource, much less important, is lines in a who command. People who go home leaving their terminal logged in clutter up such commands, and can prevent the whole command from fitting on the screen. This is pretty picky, though. Mark ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.