With the help of Kai O'Yang I've managed to kill this particular problem.
It had nothing to do with the auto-logout feature of tcsh, but instead a
problem with CDE 1.0.2.
Many thanks to Kai O'Yang for his helpful pointer to the /var/dt/Xerrors
log file.
oyang@mars.fcit.monash.edu.au (Kai O'Yang)
The problem as it turns out is that neither of the machines that were
having the auto-logout problem had a graphics card installed. The default
installation of CDE 1.0.2 assumes a graphics card is installed and attempts
to startup X on a non-existant console. This causes, eventually, the
dtlogin process to reset itself after a period of time. If dtlogin resets
or gets killed then all users who gained access to the machine using
dtlogin will have their window manager killed logging them off.
The fix for this was to edit the file /usr/dt/config/Xservers and comment
out the ":0 ...." line. This will configure dtlogin so that it will not
attempt to startup X on the console.
In my mind this problem was caused partially by my own stupidity. ;)
However, I really don't appreciate code that isn't robust enough to check
for these types of problems.
Again, many thanks to all that replied.
-=pierre
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Pierre Padovani padovani@aaec.com
System Administrator (617)890-4200 xt3255
Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation.
"Murphy was an optimist."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:47 CDT