On Jan 23, 2004, at 10:04 PM, Lee Larson wrote: > On Jan 23, 2004, at 7:16 PM, Jerry Yeager suggested: > >> Cron task that runs every 10 minutes or so that >> 1) immediately exits unless it is in the disallowed time (to cut down >> on wasting cycles). > > I had a more efficient method in mind. At login, look at the time. If > the time is legal, schedule an "at" to kick off at the end of the > legal time and force a logout. If the time is illegal, force the > logout right away. There's no need to mess with the crontab.
The one problem here is the one you mentioned about him not knowing much about scripting. If he places this in the user's start-up items rather than hiding it nicely, then she may have enough skill to find it and modify it. Kids these days! > >> 2) greps the list of apps that are running for the ones like >> browsers, IRC, etc. then force kills those process(es). > > You could grep for those owned by the user. You can give a > SIGTERM/KILL to all the user-owned processes, but a single program > might have several processes and many open, unsaved files. This is > pretty drastic. > > My reason to do it with an Applescript is that force kills do not > always respect open files. An Applescript often can take care of this > stuff more elegantly--at least with scriptable apps. You can also log > out with an Applescript, although this is tricky because one "Are you > really sure you want to quit like you just told me you wanted to do?" > can stand in the way. > What about following up with a du command to force the hanging open files to close? The Applescript problem is one that I did not know how to avoid, hence my suggestion of the perl or shell script to just force exit. >> 3) It would need a finder like gui front end that he could use to >> make the list of restricted apps (since he does not know scripting >> very well). > > This was the "reinventing the wheel" part I was avoiding. > > Yeah the developers tools are not quite there yet in with XCode to just quickly do this. I do anticipate one learning curve that you might have to explain to him if the NetBarrier idea works on the semi-server set-up he has, that is how to interpret the logs so that he knows how to tell internet related request from other machines from the internet related requests on her machine. > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be January 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>. > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
