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by jimmy

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I am looking for an off the shelf program that will be able to notify me, via email, anytime a user (or group of users, selectable by the me) logs into the network. I am mainly looking to keep an eye on accounts with administrative rights, but may want to watch others later on.

If there is not an off the shelf product, but there is an effective way to accomplish this on Windows 2000 server, that would be my next alternative.

I have considered creating another login script for the accounts that I want to monitor, and adding a command that would append a log file, or something like that, each time the user logs in. Kinda red-neck engineer it, if all else fails :-)

4 replies

by mgonzales

Do the red-neck thing it's the cheapest. But you might want to consider doing it with the same login script. Put a section in there that if the username logs in it runs the append to a log thing.

Good Luck!

by joseph moore

You Might Be A Redneck If....
you put the following line in your logon scripts:

now.exe %username% -- %computername% >>\\SERVER1\SHARE\logfile.txt

This is what I do. I have this line in every user login script (and every user has a login script). NOW.EXE is from the Windows Resource It. It is just like the ECHO command, plus it displays the date and time. Very useful for something like this. Anyway, I've been running this for 3 years now, and I can see who logs into where when. Here is a sample of my log:

Fri May 21 15:42:05 2004 -- BOB -- MACHINE1

Fri May 21 16:31:50 2004 -- TOM -- MACHINE2

Fri May 21 17:54:58 2004 -- JIM -- MACHINE3

Fri May 21 19:39:52 2004 -- Administrator -- SERVER1

etc.

by mfischer

Enable auditing, and then filter what you're looking for in the event viewer. Auditing (set in the domain gpo) will give you a fairly fine toothed comb to get any information you are looking for.

by jazzywalid

What I used to do is :
1- installed MSDE on a server.
2- wrote two scripts for logons and logoffs that write to a DB in MSDE the TIME, DATE, USERNAME, COMPUTERNAME, LOGONSERVER, LOGON or LOGOFF.
3- I queried the via Excel or Access

In this way you can customize the script and add any parameter you want. In my experience, if you have more than ~250 logons to the servers, the .TXT file will be hard to query. And if you DCs in different sites the Security Log in the Event viewer will not help a lot and cannot be queried easily.

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