What machine is a user logged on to? 1

[secutanudu]

Is there any way in Active Directory to find out what PC (or PC's) a user is currently logged on to?

Also - is there a way to find out who is currently logged onto a specific machine?

 

[mrmoneymatters]

locateuser is a tool that will find where a specific user is logged on.

 

[secutanudu]

Where do you get it? Is it included with Windows?

 

[SteveMCSE]

do a net send <username> "test message"
then do nbtstat -c
Simple.. the user will see a message though.

 

[secutanudu]

Yeah i'd rather not have the user see anything - any other way to do it (even if more complicated?)

Thanks.

 

[SteveMCSE]

I spent the first half of today looking for a solution to the same problem before I came across your post. If you have SMS you can look in the server under Queries|All Users and then sort by name. If you have nbtscan (download for free) you can do a scan on the network and then import to an xls file and then sort by name or filter by name. There are plenty of options. Map a drive to each remote machine one and a time and then do an nbtstat -c. That would be very very time consuming. Last option I have is to ask the user. Simplest, but most frustrating.

 

[Binkie]

SysTrack from Lakeside Software can track this data too. SysTrack reports who the current logged on user of the system is, and also stores a history of who logged on to which systems.

Check it out when you have a chance,

http://www.lakesidesoftware.com

http://www.lakesidesoftware.com/SessionHistory.htm

And under the System Information, it lists who the current user is.

 

[TravisM]

I wrote a really simple KIX script to write this info to a log file, and evolved it to write directly to SQL or an access database, the best option really is just to build this into the login scripts and have it update someplace each time the scripts run.

It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it's the most direct option. I'll log all kinds of things now when the users log in and with a SQL backend it's very fast and completely transparent to them.

I imagine you could do it with a BAT file also, just pipe the information directly out to a text file on a network share, but it's not quite as robust.

 

[SteveMCSE]

That lakeside software program looks nice. It's not free. I found the best way is to go to the WINS server and just export the data to a file and import it into excel. You can do a find or you can scroll manually. Works for me.

 

[lengoo]

There is a great little free utilty called psloggedon which you can use.. look for it on the internet..

 

[bofhrevenge2]

Agreed it's very handy as are the rest of the free tools from Sysinternals.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pstools.shtml

 

[SteveMCSE]

Yeah, I downloaded it this morning. The psloggedon tool is a little cumbersome, but that's ok because the rest of the free tools are amazing. I really like the psexec. To be able to ping back to my machine from a server or run ipconfig on a remote host is a really handy feature.

 

[sysadmin123]

another tool is belarc advisor.

http://www.belarc.com

There is a free tool to download but you can't use it in a corporate environment. We purchased the Belmanage package and I will have to say it's really nice! It tells you pretty much everything you need to know about each computer in your network.

 

[pickletech]

I created a small script to check which workstations a user is logged into, it's ugly and not user friendly, but if anyone wants it they can have it for free. It searches by IP addresses, so you can just put in a range of IP's instead of checking a whole domain. Just post a reply on this thread if you want it, and I will try to find some way to get it to you.