Subject:  ison - Network user logon monitor
Archive-name: ison/part01
Environment: UNIX, finger, optionally rpcsvc
Supersedes: ison: Volume 34, Issue 4

Version 5.0 changes:
   + Complete rewrite; numerous minor changes.
   + RPC support added, drastically improving efficiency.
   + Can detect idle time (even for Finger), and can poll until not-idle.
   + Multiple hosts, Multiple users!
   + Monitor mode, where ison prints logon and logoff messages
   + Commands can contain %flags that are expanded to the appropriate value
	 before the command is run, i.e. "write %u %t" executes
	 "write <username> <tty>"
   + Powerful user files can be used, to use one ison process to do
	 different things with different users.
   + If the information is available, ison can tell you the actual
	 logon time and tty of remote (and local) users.
   + More detailed output printed.
   + Manual page rewritten.

IsOn's primary purpose is to let you know when someone logs on. You could
always sit there at your terminal typing 'finger' or 'who' every 5 minutes,
but that's boring and unproductive. IsOn makes this easy. If you wanted to
know the instant I logged on, all it would take is a simple:

   ison mgleason@cse.unl.edu

When I do log on, ison would respond:

   ** IsOn: mgleason@cse.unl.edu logged on to ttyq28 since 8:41 PM
			and is not idle.

IsOn lowers it's priority automatically, so it takes very little CPU,
and spares you the trouble of remembering to use 'nice.' It also puts
itself in the background automatically. For remote addresses (those in
dude@machine.domain format) the rusers function from the rpcsvc library
is used, or the 'finger' utility if it has to, and for a user on the same
machine that you are on, IsOn will simply walk the 'utmp' file.

Enjoy!
--mike gleason = mgleason@cse.unl.edu

