FIDO

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 9 Aug 1988
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NAME

fido - a watchdog for users and machines  

SYNOPSIS

fido &  

FEATURES

Fido periodically scans the files created by rwhod(8c) and reports the commings and goings of people and machines. Fido reads a .fido init file to determine what to watch. .fido is first checked for in the current directory, and then in the directory contained in the HOME environment variable.

The .fido file consists of a list of commands from the list below. Lines starting with a hash-mark (#) are discarded as comments.

user user[@host]
Watch for a specified user. Normally only the first login and last logout of the specified user will be reported. If a host is specified, then only instances of that user on that host are reported (useful when multiple users have the same name). You can have multiple lines with the same username and different hosts (including the form with no host).
[no]beep
Ring bell on output (default is nobeep)
[no]machines
Watch machines go up and down (default is machines)
[no]stamp
Output timestamps. (default is stamp)
idletime minutes
Specify the number of minutes until a user is declared idle (default is 15).
downtime minutes
Specify the number of minutes before a host is declared down (default is 8). Note!! If the rwho(1c) spool directory is located on another (NFS) host, a skew between time of day clocks can cause major misery.
sleeptime seconds
Specify number of seconds to sleep between scans (default is 60, minimum is 32).

You must specify at least one user line or machines in your .fido file, otherwise fido has nothing to to!! Each time it wakes up fido checks to see if it's parent pid is now pid 1 (init), if this is true, then fido's orginal parent must have exited, and so fido follows its master into oblivion.  

FILES

/usr/spool/rwho
rwho spool area
./.fido
fido init file first choice
$HOME/.fido
fido init file
 

SEE ALSO

who(1), rwho(1c), ruptime(1c), environ(5v), rwhod(8c), hungry(l)  

AUTHOR

Philip L. Budne, Boston University, Distributed Systems Group  

BUGS

See features.

No way to exclude a given machine, or user on a given machine.

No way to specify a particular terminal line.

No way to specify any user on a given host (ie; watch for idle workstations)

Fido was inspired by a program of the same name running on the MIT ITS operating system for PDP-10s.

Fido can only read 100 files from /usr/spool/rwho (see NUMFILES in the source) and the total number of bytes consumed by the filenames cannot exceed BPHOST*NUMFILES. (BPHOST is currently 32)


 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
FEATURES
FILES
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR
BUGS

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Time: 21:52:16 GMT, February 02, 2023