Session Recording files are 10GB

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager - Cloakware Password Authority (PA)
• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)

Issue/Introduction

Customer is finding the session recording files are so huge.
They take long time to encode and result in files over 10GB in size.

PAM Applet Timeout was set to 180 minutes.
Why is the RDP/VNC Sessions not terminating after 180 minutes?
This is resulting in 10GB session recording files and takes long time to process the encoding.

Environment

PAM 2.8.3
PAM 3.1.1
VNC running on the target device
PAM Access Method (VNC) was used to connect.
GUI Session Recording was enabled.

Resolution

10GB Session Recording was due to users accessing VNC session for 8 hours.
There was confusion that "Applet Timeout" was thought to be "Max Timeout" where it was actually "Idle Timeout".
PAM does not have max timeout feature and only enforces idle timeout.

You may workaround this by enforcing max timeout setting on the VNC server side.
For example, RealVNC server has "ConnTimeout" feature you might be of your interest.
https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/docs/server-parameter-ref.html

Additional Information

https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/docs/server-parameter-ref.html