Clearing Locked Records/Sessions for Disconnected Users

[Tom Pellitieri]

Our field employees use laptops with wireless network cards to connect to our system through our VPN.  Unfortunately, they are sometimes in poor reception areas, and their connections get dropped.  This leaves their sessions connected, and any open items locked.

So far, the only way I know to free up the locked records cleanly is to tandem to the port and save or escape out of the screen.  Also, there are times when the buffer is full, and I wind up using stopudt or (worse case) deleteuser to end the detached session.

Unfortunately, I can only do these from the root account, which means that they must contact an administrator to free up the locks.

Does anyone know of a way for a user to disconnect a previous session without having to get an administrator involved??

--Tom Pellitieri, Century Equipment

[Colin Alfke]

I think with stopudt the user can logoff their own process (it may depend on platform - I've only tried it on Windows). So you may be able to set something up for them to clear there own sessions.

Another thought would be to have the users connect to something like a terminal server which is more robust about dealing with dropped connections.

hth
Colin

[Tom Pellitieri]

Thanks for the feedback.  I was able to create a process that did the following:

1) AIX command "who am i" to determine current login and device
2) AIX command "listuser | grep udt | grep <user>" to get all instances of user login
3) Prompt the user to log off sessions from (2) not returned in (1)
4) AIX command "stopudt" for each process to eliminate (if requested)

We'll see how it goes...

--Tom

[Colin Alfke]

Don't forget that UD will give you a lot of these without having to shell out (and worry about O/S specific commands).

Look at @LOGNAME, @USERNO, LISTUSER, and even GETUSER and GETENV.

Good luck

Colin