| The procedure that Zap uses to kill off a process on the system
is the SYS$DELPRC system call. This is, as I recall, the same method
that SPIRIT uses to kill of processes. So, in that respect, Zap
and SPIRIT are similar.
The question that you should be asking yourself is, do I really
want to stop a user when they are running MAXCIM? Since MAXCIM
is a system which uses RMS to perform its updates on multiple files,
the act of killing a user can cause you some serious problems with
files becoming out of sync.
One of the problems with SPIRIT is that it does not enable you
to turn it off under various conditions. It is either on for the
entire system, with specified uic's immune, or its off. When you
have an application on your system that uses DBMS or is as complicated
and critical as MAXCIM, you may not want users in these applications
to be killed.
Zap, on the other hand, can be set up to have different idle
time limits based on such factors as UIC, image name, and terminal
type. This means that if you have a critical application on your
system, say MAXCIM, you can make that application immune from Zap.
If, however, you actually do want to kill off users in MAXCIM,
then any idle process deletion utility (SPIRIT, ZAP, etc) will do.
Keith Maconi
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