Force Restart After Inactivity

[dtmille2]

Hi all,

I have a need for a script that forces Macs to restart after 10 minutes of inactivity. There would need to be a warning that pops up as well, say after 8 minutes of inactivity to give a user a heads up that a restart is coming. Anyone know of such a script or way to provide such a feature that is already in existence?

Thanks!

[dsavageED]

You may be able to adapt our auto logout daemon; https://github.com/UoE-macOS/lab/blob/master/ed.dst.labs-auto-logout-py.plist (daemon) https://github.com/UoE-macOS/lab/blob/master/labconfig-auto-logout.py (script, there may be an older shell version of the script too) to perform this task... 

[dtmille2]

Thank you @dsavageED . If you are adding this to Jamf as a script that runs at a Login, how do you get it to trigger on a recurring basis after a user logs in? From looking at the script it looks like it exits if the idle time is detected to be less than 1.

[dsavageED]

The script as it stands is called by a daemon, both are meant to be locally installed on the system. It isn't something that is easy to do just running off a login hook...

To run from a login hook, you could generate a script and then launch it in the background with a loop that sleeps for 30 mins or something, but in that case you could just run the script at check-in on the Mac. Short answer is I don't think login is the right place to try and run this from.

[dtmille2]

@dsavageED have you upgraded this script to work with Python 3 in Monterey?  I have attempted to do so, but am having trouble getting Jamf process to quit to allow the logout.

[Samstar777]

May I know what are you trying to achieve as restarting Mac when it is inactive for 10 minutes will give bad user experience.

[dtmille2]

Sure @Samstar777 , if you are curious it is for a college library, and is meant to prevent a student walking way while leaving browsers logged into a website, or other personal data on the machine accessible to the next student using the machine.

We aren't currently set up to have our students log into a Mac with their school IDs so, this is an alternative.

Our Macs are frozen with Deep Freeze for Mac, so a restart takes the Mac back to a clean slate.

Our Windows machines do the same thing, but log the student out rather than restart the Mac, as our students do log into these devices.

[Samstar777]

You may explore below link once

https://github.com/rosedu/Pidgin/blob/master/pidgin/gtkidle.c

-Samstar777