Need account to only log off users

[patchkit]

I do not have a 24/7 help desk. Over the last few months all machines have been added to a 2003 domain and screen savers have been set to require passwords to unlock systems after 10 minutes. I have users who work different shifts each week so time outs cannot be used.

If a user leaves for home while still logged on, 10 minutes after they leave the system locks and it takes on of the IT staff to remote in and unlock the system. This is rather annoying at 3:00 in the morning.

Is there a way i can create a local or domain account that will only unlock a workstation (i really don't care if the user loses work at this point) and then promptly logoff? I do not want users to have admin rights, just the ability to have managers unlock the workstations in the event one of thier employees leaves.

Thanks in advance.

 

[TMiyake]

Have you thought about giving people the right to remotely shut down the machine? You can assign that right within a GPO and push it to all workstations. I can’t think of any right other than administrative that would allow someone to unlock the workstation, but you can give the right to shutdown & restart. You can push a batch file out to the workstations so all they would have to type in is “sd WORKSTATION”. You can put SD.bat within the path, and if they are standard XP machines, the batch file could look something like this:

@echo off
Shutdown –m \\%1 –r –t 02 –f

There is an option in the shutdown command to logoff the user, but I think you need admin rights for that. You could also see if giving the user the right to shutdown the machine would also give them the right to reboot, but I’ve personally never tested it.
I hope this helps.


Thanks,

Tom

 

[patchkit]

Well, thats thinking outside the box and it sounds like it works. Thanks.

 

[linney]

What about a "low tech" solution such as turning the power off, either by switching the machine off or pulling the plug?

 

[TheLad]

Then you can cause other issues such as OS corruption resulting in a rebuild of the PC. Shuting the workstation down using the shutdown.exe would be a more prudent solution as already suggested

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