RE: [PLUG] 'ifconfig eth0 down' on mouse/kbd being idle

["Mark Baker" <mrkbkr@gmail.com>]

There are some simple utilities that can be called for some of the linux
distros that give kb mouse idle times.   What distro are we working with?

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces@lists.phillylinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces@lists.phillylinux.org] On Behalf Of gabriel
rosenkoetter
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 5:10 PM
To: plug@lists.phillylinux.org
Subject: Re: [PLUG] 'ifconfig eth0 down' on mouse/kbd being idle

On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 10:58:31AM -0700, jadoba@jadoba.net wrote:
> I'd like to create a shell script that will execute 'ifconfig eth0 down'
> when both the mouse and keyboard have been idle (iow, no input) for a 
> set amount of time. I would also like for the same script to bring 
> eth0 back up when a key is pressed or the mouse is moved.

The "run a cron job once a minute" techniques seem like a huge waste of
resources to me.

You want to be hooking into something that's already polling for human I/O
events (if this were NetBSD, I'd say "wscons") and registering (and then
renewing later) a timer on them which, if expired takes action.

Maybe the Linux distribution involved makes use of something like
SCIM:

  http://www.scim-im.org/

which looks like it probably provides some hooks for monitoring
keydown/keyup mousedown/mouseup.

Another decent place to look is the XScreenSaver source; checking the same
places it does for I/O information should work, and you could run the
process that checks and downs/ups the interface in the same way
(automatically forking and sitting in the background till an exit request is
passed to it later).

--
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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