Setting a Login Inactivity Timer

After an administrator provides appropriate credentials and successfully logs into a router, the router could become vulnerable to attack if the administrator walks away. To help prevent an unattended router from becoming a security weakness, a 10-minute inactivity timer is enabled by default. However, Cisco recommends that inactivity timers be set to no more than 3 minutes. Fortunately, administrators can adjust the inactivity windows with the exec-timeout minutes [seconds] command, issued in line configuration mode. Consider Example, which shows setting the inactivity timer for the console, auxiliary, and vty lines to 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

Example:

Setting an Inactivity Timer
Router# conf term
Router(config)# line con 0
Router(config-line)# exec-timeout 2 30
Router(config-line)# exit
Router(config)# line aux 0
Router(config-line)# exec-timeout 2 30
Router(config-line)# exit
Router(config)# line vty 0 4
Router(config-line)# exec-timeout 2 30


NOTE Although it isn’t recommended, you can disable the inactivity timer by entering a 0 for both the minutes and seconds arguments in the exec-timeout command (that is, exec-timeout 0 0).




See Also:



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