feature request - inactivity timeout

[jpuskar]

Do you think there is a good way to disconnect sessions after an inactivity period?

Right now I have simulated this by:

• Applying a blank screensaver after 5 minutes using xfce4-screensaver. The blank screensaver causes low enough traffic that nginx will disconnect the websocket, dropping the session.
• Setting the tokenDuration to 5mins (I'm using LDAP because I could not get this working with Azure AD OIDC).
• Blocking /api/token_refresh via the nginx ingress

So the end result being that nginx disconnects me after 10 minutes (screensaver + proxy-read-timeout). And the user can't just refresh the page, because /api/refresh_token is blocked, so it causes a brand new login.

But this is somewhat fragile because it relies on the screensaver to stop websocket traffic. This seems like it does not work 100% of the time.

So I wonder, is it possible to modify the UI code to somehow recognize that the user does not have the tab open and disconnect the websocket client-side?

[tinyzimmer]

There is a server-side mechanism for this here. But nothing on the client side. Would be open to PRs with ideas though.

EDIT: Not really a timeout tho, more a safeguard against people leaving sessions open in general

[jpuskar]

I saw that!

I think fundamentally the only thing truly aware of 'inactivity' is the desktop container itself.

In my case, I'm running in nonroot mode, so I can trust the container a little bit. E.g., I can mostly rely on a trigger like running a screensaver.

So I wonder if there is a way to trigger a disconnect from inside the container (for example, have the screensaver kill a process), but without causing the container to get deleted. But I think anything I try to do would prevent a reconnection.

Because although the container is aware that there is inactivity and has launched a process, what I really need to end up doing is closing the websocket. And the container doesn't maintain the websocket -- the VNC to HTTPS bridge does that which I think runs in a sidecar.

Pretty interesting problem.