How can I tell if someone's logged in?

There are two ways to find this out. If you just want to know where Jack Florey is now, you can type

% zlocate jflorey
and Zephyr will reply with his current location (e.g., M11-116-1), if he's logged in and not hidden, along with the date and time he logged in there.

If you want to be told whenever a friend logs in or out, you can use znol, the ``Zephyr Notify On Login'' program. You simply create a file in your account called .anyone, and put your friends' names in it, one to a line, like this:

jtkirk
spock
lmccoy
uhura
jrand
Then, each time you log in, type znol. (You can add this to your .startup.X file, too.) You'll get a list of everyone in your .anyone file who's currently logged in; then, whenever someone logs in or out, you'll get a Zephyr notice. (A GUI version of znol called xzul exists in the outland locker.)

Actually, that's not quite true. The person has to have told Zephyr, ``Whenever I log in, announce my arrival.'' This is done by typing

% zctl set exposure net-announced
once. (It is automatic after that.) There are several other choices besides net-announced. The first of these choices is none. This disables Zephyr entirely. Next is opstaff, which allows you to receive important/emergency messages about the status of Project Athena. Another, realm-visible, will let people zlocate you, but it will not send messages when you log in and out. The default is realm-visible.

Luke Faraone 2012-01-11