How to check login status of a Windows PC

[pm]

We have a lab setup where there are a lot of MS Windows based PC's that people access remotely to do various tasks. For the log in, we primarily use MS Windows "Remote Desktop Connection" and within Unix, "rdesktop". We've been having problems with people having to guess which systems may be available and which ones are taken when deciding which system to log into. I'd like to create a webpage that people could look at, ideally in Linux.

Does anyone know a method - ideally a Linux scriptable method - that could be used to check which systems have users logged in, and which ones do not currently have a user? Ideally, I'd love a way to check if there is a user on a system and how long it's been since they did anything (idle time) so that if all systems are taken, I can make a judgement about which user to boot off.

I spent a while searching on Google, and on Anandtech, and I couldn't find out anything.

 

[Wizkid]

This is for Windows, but have a look anyways 🙂

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsLoggedOn.html

Could you get any info from smbclient in linux? There are all those security websites that can pull the username, so there must be some way...

 

[pm]

Thanks, Wizkid. It's not precisely what I was looking for - it looks at the registry and so I'm seeing lots of false-positives (it thinks there are people on systems when there aren't). I think I can screen these out though. As far as smbclient, from reading now that you suggested it, it looks like it doesn't work quite the way that I was hoping, but I'll keep reading.

Thanks very much for the suggestions!

 

[Atheus]

In unix the 'who' command will list the logged on users, you could write a script to send this data to a server every 10 seconds or something. I'm sure there's a way to do this in windows too, but i dont know it off hand. There _is_ a way to enumerate windows users remotely, but it's a bit of a blackhat thing so i'll PM it.