Login & Logoff Scripts (Windows XP SP2)

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Hello All,

Ain’t been around here for a while but nothing much seems to have changed, still LOADS of useful info. Now down to bussiness. Need to keep a record of whos accessing a pc in our office. Wanted to use login & logoff scripts to do this but thats where i fell short. Can anyone give me some tips on this. The script needs to:

Login:
Ask user for Name
Write the date, time and name to a file

Logoff:
Write the date & time of logoff to the same file

Please please help.

P.s. Am starting my MCSE soon so maybe i’l be able to help for a change.

Thanks in advance
Jamie

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Wouldn’t it be simpler to use XP’s Audit Policy to track this?

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Never heard of it i’m afraid so i’m not sure. Will it allow me to ask for the user on login? this came about because there are multiple users (50 +) using the same machine and i want to keep an eye on it’s usage. Not perfect but don’t know any other way of doing it!

Jamie

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To set auditing on your computer:

Start | Run, type GPEDIT.MSC and hit Enter. On Group Policy console navigate to Computer configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Audit Policy. Set events you want to monitor.

To see auditing results:

Start | Run, type EVENTVWR and hit Enter. On Event Viewer window, navigate to Security on the left pane and double-click each event on the right pane you want to see.

More information:

Chapter 3: Audit Policy

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But that won’t allow me to track 50 users using the same account would it?

Jamie

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No, it won’t. If you have 50 users all using the same account, then your “security” is pretty well non-existant. If you want to track users via logon or logoff scripts, what’s to prevent any user from simply using a bogus name? The only way to track this reliably is to have separate accounts for each user.

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This website is a handy reference for scripting basics. On asking the user for a name, click VBScript Reference Guide, and then choose User Interface. On working with text files, click WSH Reference Guide, then choose File System Object.

And this Microsoft page is a more complete reference for working with text files using the File System Object.

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Edited by HansV to insert [%] tags in order to avoid problems with % followed by a hex number Thanks, Hans!!

Assuming you can find out how to set up logon and logoff scripts…

A BATch file can be used to write the username, computername, date and time to a file (or files) ‘somewhere’ on a server, probably. You can use a single target file, or one for each PC, perhaps. You don’t have to ask the user anything!

For the Logon script, to a single file…
echo %date% %time% %username% logged on at %computername% >> servernamedirectorynamelogonoff.txt

For the Logon script, to a PC-name-based file…
echo %date% %time% %username% logged on at %computername% >> servernamedirectoryname%computername%.txt

I think you can work out the equivalent for a logoff script!

John

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