[horde] forcing logouts?

Kevin Konowalec webadmin at ualberta.ca
Mon Feb 26 11:22:08 PST 2007


Is it possible to not allow a user to exit the browser or navigate to  
a non-horde URL without first logging out of horde?  I've been trying  
to track usage of the system and had been getting exceedingly strange  
numbers.

Thinking my script was buggered I decided to do some simple log  
analysis, which in itself produced strange numbers.  I wrote up a  
tiny perl script that would read the horde log files and simply count  
the number of logins, logouts, and failed logins that it sees.  This  
is what it reported:


# gzcat /var/log/webmail.0.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  51202
Total number of logouts:  23336
Total number of faileds:  3754

# gzcat /var/log/webmail.1.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  38768
Total number of logouts:  18320
Total number of faileds:  2858

# gzcat /var/log/webmail.2.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  56933
Total number of logouts:  27585
Total number of faileds:  3976

# gzcat /var/log/webmail.3.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  61012
Total number of logouts:  29180
Total number of faileds:  4399

# gzcat /var/log/webmail.4.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  61670
Total number of logouts:  29739
Total number of faileds:  4409

# gzcat /var/log/webmail.5.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  41565
Total number of logouts:  20405
Total number of faileds:  3454

# gzcat /var/log/webmail.6.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  58574
Total number of logouts:  29117
Total number of faileds:  4301

# gzcat /var/log/webmail.7.gz | ./logtest
Analysis complete:
Total number of logins:  73790
Total number of logouts:  35666
Total number of faileds:  5453


This suggests to me one of 2 possibilities.  Either horde is not  
reporting all logouts (unlikely) OR roughly half of our users are not  
logging out properly.  Since a good chunk of our users are students  
in public labs this brings up some major security and privacy issues.

So I was hoping it would be possible to prevent users from navigating  
away from horde (in the window the user logged into horde in) or  
shutting down the browser without logging out.  Has anyone looked  
into doing something similar?  I'm sure I could go through and add a  
chunk of javascript to every page as a footer that would accomplish  
this but if there's a better/more elegant solution I'd love to know  
about it.


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