User login tracking

[sd0t1]

Does anyone know a way to reliably track the login and logout events for a user?
I am tasked with creating a 'time and attendance' app.

I need to be able to tell when a user logged in and logged out.
I looked at LDAP, but evidently it's unreliable. My users use XP mostly.

I thought about writing a page that a user can login and click "I'm Here" and use a timestamp to capture that event. But that puts everyone on the honor system, which will not work.

Has anyone faced this before? We use AD on our network.

Are there other AD attributes that may be more reliable?
I can't imagine there is not a solution other than buying an old time clock and installing a camera in view to see who's punching which time card.

Any ideas?

 

[hammnet]

Do your users log in/out everyday consistently? Otherwise I don't think that tracking them via logins would be valid either. If your users do login/logout consistently then I would suggest maybe a batch script that automatically updates a centrally stored list with their username, function(login/out), and current time.

Environment variables:
%username%
%date% %time%

CCNP, CCNA Voice

 

[sd0t1]

Hmmm, they login upon arrival, out at lunch, back in after lunch and out at the end of the day.

However, your batch script idea is interesting.

Are you saying create a .txt file somewhere with all my users name in it.
Then upon login I can write a script to capture username and current time?
Then update the file?

Then I could read the file into my database for reporting and such.

Is this where your going with this idea? Am i on the right track?

 

[hammnet]

Yes, that's pretty much what I was going for. If the users have unique login names then you could just use the windows environment variables instead of creating a list manually.

Something like this on logon/logoff:

echo UserLogin - %username% - %date% %time% >> \\YOURSERVER\SHARENAME\output.txt

If you use group policy then setting something like this should be quick and easy.

CCNP, CCNA Voice