need a program that monitors employee logins, preferably freeware

April 4, 2006 9:45 PM

I have a client who has a Windows 2000 server and a LAN consisting of a whopping 3 other computers. He would like a program that lets him know when employees have logged onto the network...preferably by email notification. He doesn't care for anything as machine-centric or intrusive as Spectorsoft, but would like a small utility that does it's small job well for a small cost. All suggestions are appreciated.
posted by titans13 to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Somewhere in the profile options is a setting to run a .cmd file on logon and logoff. Just enable that and then use whatever command-line email program you want. If it were me I'd do this in perl, but you can surely find a number of programs that can send email from the command line.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:53 PM on April 4, 2006

Is the server a domain controller (or whatever they call it these days?). If so, you should be able to turn on auditing and then get the data out of the event log using some sort of log watcher.
posted by Good Brain at 11:34 PM on April 4, 2006

If this is just for friendly purposes (that is, if the employees will know this is happening and will cooperate) then maybe he could just ask everyone to run an IM program and configure it to connect upon login? Then he could get pop-up notifications or audio alerts when the sign on, etc..
posted by Songdog at 6:18 AM on April 5, 2006

Unless the server is a domain controller as Good Brain notes, you won't be able to get this information from the server, but will instead have to get it from the LAN clients. Do you want to know when the employees log onto the computers, or onto the network? Do they have a local account? Administrator access?

You could do what Rhomboid suggests, or 1) give your customer's machine network access to the security logs on each of the three LAN clients, or 2) write a script to email changes to the logs at a) time of change or b) every n hours (emailing the entire log every time is also an option but probably not the best one) which would be trivial to do with perl (activestate.com or cygwin.com if you're familiar enough with perl to write your own, both free for windows) or 3) plenty of other solutions to this problem.

Unfortunately I don't know of a program that can do what you want, but hopefully this is enough to help you solve the problem.

Of course, if the employees have local administrator access to the clients, they will be able to disable and/or falsify pretty much any solution to this problem.
posted by cactus at 6:49 AM on April 5, 2006