Timing out AFP Sessions (for those who forget to log out)

[spectre_240sx]

Is there a way to time out an AFP session after a certain amount of inactivity? We’re a school here and people share computers constantly. Students have access to a home directory on the server and I don’t want one student getting on right after another and getting into their home directory. I know they need to take a certain amount of responsibility, but it would be nice to help them out with a little extra security. Aldo, if this is possible, can it be done on specific computers only, or would it be for all users connecting to that server? There are computers in the administrative office where a timeout would be quite unwelcome.

Thanks,
Brian

[spectre_240sx]

Well, it’s not an automatically mounted home directory. The computers aren’t authenticating to the server, they just have home directories that are available to them.

[MDhaliwal]

Josh’s advice still applies

If these machines are just on continually and then your users sit down and manually login to various network shares, just control your idle time settings on the share.

Go into Server Admin -> AFP -> Settings -> Idle Users.

You can specify an amount of time for the share to stay live after a user becomes idle. Your even able to make exceptions for specific types of users and send a message to the client, so that they, if they were still using the computer, know that the share was disconnected on purpose and wasn’t simply a network glitch.

[xdavid]

Hi Josh, what should I be checking out (in man pages?) for the CLI to modify this “auto-reconnect timeout”?

I’ve never got the idle user timeout to work consistently & I’m hoping this helps ‘fix’ things. Ta.

[Author]

Posts