How to lock screen

[Binyon Steve Contr DMOC 705 EXS/ASRCC]

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Stuart Sears
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2006 7:30 AM
To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
Subject: Re: How to lock screen

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Patrick Derwael wrote:
> Stuart,
> 
> Thank you for pointing me at vlock : it does its locking job properly.

You misunderstood my purpose I think.
vlock -a
when typed on a virtual console (text-mode) will lock the *entire*
console. No one will be able to switch back to your X display to start
any other terminals without typing in the root password. It's much
better in this regard than an Xscreensaver lock.  Any user who knows how
can break that and terminate your X session.
(hint: lock the screen in KDE/GNOME as *any* user and then type
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace together)
However, vlock will definitely not work in an xterm (gnome-terminal,
konsole etc) on an X desktop.

Stuart
- --
Stuart Sears RHCA RHCX

Good answer Stuart, heres another situation (and maybe a separate thread),
the screen is locked by a user, who then goes on vacation (for example) and
the screen needs to be unlock, currently (under RHEL 3 and 4), the superuser
is unable to unlock the screen (using the root password), yet the
xscreensaver man pages says that the root password will unlock the screen.
Why can't root unlock user's screen?  Currently we are remotely logging into
the system and killing xscreensaver in order to unlock.  Is there some flag
that needs to be set?  In the .xscreensaver file, lock is set to true.

Thanks all
~smbinyon