[22224] in Hotline Meeting
Athena Rules of Use
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (timkwan@MIT.EDU)
Wed Apr 13 16:54:41 1994
From: timkwan@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 94 16:54:34 -0400
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Sorry for bringing this up again, but here goes...
At the athena prompt, type:
olc answers
Then choose the following menu items:
2 ACCOUNTS Answers
1 ATHENA RULES OF USE
> The Athena Rules of Use are a list of guidelines for legitimate and
> appropriate use of the Athena system, and as they are STRICTLY monitored,
> they should be adhered to at all times.
>
> These rules may be found displayed on the walls of all public clusters;
> they may also be read on-line by typing "help" at the athena% prompt, and
> following this menu and selecting the following series of menus:
>
> 1. Welcome to Athena
> 4. Athena Rules of Use
I am in M1-142 now, and I don't see these rules displayed on the walls.
There's the "First Come, First Serve -- NOT!" poster, but I don't see
anything about the "Do not leave your workstation unattended for more
than 20 minutes" rule.
The reason I am bothered about this is that when I see people waiting
for a workstation, I feel compelled to tell them that it is OK to log
out (i.e. reboot) that workstation in the corner with an elapsed time
of over 20 minutes because the Athena Rules of Use says so. Then
they'd say, "Oh, but the ['Click me if you need me' icon] is not
showing yet."
Then I'd say, "But the rules of use says you CAN log a person out if
the machine is left unattended for over 20 minutes. Besides you CAN
disable the 'Click me if you need me' icon by running xscreensaver
with a resource of:
XScreensaver*logoutButtonTimeout: 0
man xscreensaver:
> (no command-line option) (logoutButtonTimeout)
> If this resource is set to a non-zero value and the screen is
> locked, then a button will be popped up on the root window that
> many minutes after the screen has been locked. If the button is
> clicked, then xscreensaver will act as if its timeout has expired
> (see above). The default value of this resource is 30 minutes; a
> value of 0 disables the logout button completely.
Then they'd all look at me wondering whether to believe me or not. I
suggest that the default logoutButtonTimeout be set to 20 minutes to
be consistent with the "Do not leave your workstation unattended for
more than 20 minutes" rule.
The amazing thing, though, is that there have been numerous occasions
when a workstation is in fact showing the 'click me if you need me'
icon, and I'd tell one of those who were waiting for a workstation
that s/he can go ahead and click on the floating icon to log the user
out, and s/he'd say, "Umm...no, that's not a nice thing to do." Sigh.
Well, at any rate, I think we need an Athena Rules poster (which
includes the 20-minute rule) in M1-142 (not sure about the other
clusters) so I can actually point the person to the rule and not
appear like I am making all this up.
-Tim
