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Posted by Alan J Rosenthal on November 11, 2007, 9:46 am
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>For all sorts of computer accounts -- from your personal computer
>itself to any online accounts you have (bank accounts, Amazon.com-type
>accounts, remote work access accounts, etc.), I think one should have
>quick access to a record of ALL recent logons to ones account.
This is usual for what we used to call "timesharing accounts", which
you young ones these days seem to call "shell accounts". Upon login, it
tells you the date/time and hostname of the previous login; and there is
usually a command to retrieve a list of all recent logins as you suggest
(in unix/linux, type "last user" (for a given username "user")).
Bank accounts, amazon.com, etc, are reinventing everything rather than
following in time-honoured footsteps; but some of them have some of these
attributes. My bank's web banking facility tells you the date/time of last
login when you log in.
For VPNs it might be a little trickier because your computer might
automatically connect and disconnect frequently, thus producing voluminous
logs which are difficult to look through effectively at a glance.
There's also the additional wrinkle that when you log in to a VPN, you
aren't actually interacting (personally, as opposed to automatedly) with
anything on the VPN gateway; you'd have to do some extra step to query the
log data (such as running a web browser and pointing it somewhere specific).
A facility where it could tell you your last login in the VPN protocol,
where you could configure your computer to report this information in a
pop-up dialogue you had to press 'ok' on, would be nice. I assume that
that would require a protocol change, but it could probably be made in a
both-ways-compatible manner. Of course it should be a configuration option on
the client side.
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