Had a bit of a difficult request from one of our managers. We have Workstations dotted around a building. They have asked for a webpage to be set up on the intranet, from which users can see which workstations are not in use, and hence available.

Anyone any ideas? First i was going to suggest doing a simple ping, to report which pcs are turned on to an asp web page or similar. But i now understand that most of these workstations are left logged on 24/7. I'm coming to the conclusion that i might just feedback that it's not viable, but just thought i'd field good old scoobynet for ideas.

Cheers

Avi

 

If they're not logged in but switched on, you could parse the output from an NBTSTAT command but if they're logged in, difficult to say if they're in use or not unless you export the security logs and look for a workstation lock event without a subsequent unlock event older than say 8 hours...? Or try and figure out the last time the screensaver activated?

 

the first thing to do is force logoff on inactivity via a gpo