On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:47 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:

We deployed our first CentOS-4 based workstation this past spring to see if we can conveniently replace all, or at least most, of our MS-Win based user systems with Linux boxes instead. Generally this trial unit has proved a success but there is one lingering problem that I cannot seem to find a straight-forward answer to: Is there an administrator override to a user's password protected screensaver terminal lock? So far the solution seems to have been brute force system resets and I am not happy with this caviler approach to what should be a simple, and safe, administrative procedure.

So, is there an equivalent function to MS-Win's administrator login to force entry into a locked terminal and make it available for others?

1. ssh in 2. become root 3. pkill -u <username of user who locked the screen> -f -x "^xscreensaver -nosplash$"

i think that'll do it for you; try it on a noncritical system first :)

-steve

-- If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v

James B. Byrne wrote:

We deployed our first CentOS-4 based workstation this past spring to see if we can conveniently replace all, or at least most, of our MS-Win based user systems with Linux boxes instead. Generally this trial unit has proved a success but there is one lingering problem that I cannot seem to find a straight-forward answer to: Is there an administrator override to a user's password protected screensaver terminal lock? So far the solution seems to have been brute force system resets and I am not happy with this caviler approach to what should be a simple, and safe, administrative procedure.

So, is there an equivalent function to MS-Win's administrator login to force entry into a locked terminal and make it available for others?

Here is a brute-force approach: you can force the X server to shutdown with control-alt-backspace. The screensaver does not appear to trap that key sequence for special handling, so it gets passed through to X, which shuts down. The init process should respawn the X server when it detects it's death.

Be warned, I don't think this cleanly shuts any running applications down. It forces the X server to die and any child processes will most likely die unpleasantly. I've used it before but only as a last resort. On the other hand, I've done it accidentally when trying to change screen resolutions with control-alt-+, too. I haven't had any horrible problems with this, but I am a bit leery of using it unless the need is extreme.

Hope that helps!