[Discuss] can one safely login multiple times to the same user on a modern Linux desktop?

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 03:49:57PM -0400, John Abreau wrote:
> When you've got maybe 2 productive hours available in a given day,
> it makes so much sense to spend 60-90 minutes of that time restoring
> your previous context before continuing your work. It's especially helpful
> to do this between each and every bathroom break.

Even if this isn't your situation, the fact is your session contains a
lot of state, and having to recover that state even every morning is
counterproductive.  I usually have at least a dozen terminal windows
open, plus probably the same amount of browser tabs, plus numerous
other applications, by the end of the day -- and I'm pretty good at
cleaning up junk I know I no longer need.  Most of these windows are
balancing long-running activities with shifting priorities throughout
the day, and/or parallelizing attended time, as I do something else
while some other process I've kicked off does what it needs to do in
the background.  Many of these things get carried over to the next day
or several days.

The notion that people should be required to log out of their personal
workstations when they leave for the day is typical over-paranoid
security engineer thinking...  Unless you can demonstrate a REAL threat
that is both likely[*] to occur in your environment and demonstrably
thwartable by simply loging out, completely in absentia of equivalent
attacks (like powering the machine off and stealing the disk, etc.)
that don't require the user to be logged in, having such a rule is
pointlessly counterproductive.  

[*] Where "likely" means that the risk of such an intrusion is
significant enough that the cost of failure justifies the cost of
protection.  The loss of productivity this kind of nonsense causes
adds up fast, almost certainly measuring in the millions of dollars
annually.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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