TIP: Secure root with autologout

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TIP: Secure root with autologout

Posted by Jason on Friday February 22, @12:15PM
from the lockdown-root dept.
The FreeBSD default shell (tcsh) has an automatic logout feature which will logout an account that has been idle for a specified amount of time. This feature can be used to better secure your root account- in case you forget to logout.

The command to enable this feature is set autologout = x. Where x is the number of idle minutes before an automatic logout will occur.

You can add this command to your /root/.profile file to be sure it set everytime you login to the system as root.

To set an automatic logout for 15 minutes, simply edit the .profile for the root account with your preferred editor (ee or vi in my case). Login as root like so:

Login: root
Password:********

# cd /root
# ee .profile

add:
set autologout = 15

Save the file, logout and login as root again. If you don't use the console for 15 minutes, the system should automatically log you out.

To learn more about the commands in FreeBSD and other Unix OS's, try the man pages:

man tcsh
man ee
man vi

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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
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Re: TIP: Secure root with autologout
by Santhosh Joseph on Tuesday February 26, @02:26AM

With bash shell, autologout can be enabled by setting the environment variable "TMOUT" :

export TMOUT=x where x is in SECONDS

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Re: TIP: Secure root with autologout
by Derrek on Monday August 06, @01:07PM

sh, ash, bash, bsh, ksh all use TMOUT in /etc/profile (export TMOUT=) csh and tcsh use /etc/csh.cshrc or /etc/csh.login (set autologout=)

Just tested this on Linux.

-Derrek

[ Reply to this ]

Re: TIP: Secure root with autologout
by Derrek on Monday August 06, @01:08PM

Also,

TNOUT value is in seconds. autologout value is in minutes.

-Derrek

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Re: TIP: Secure root with autologout
by aixadmin on Wednesday December 02, @06:21AM

to display the TMOUT value from ksh we can use export $TMOUT.. any idea how can we display env variables in csh ?

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