Configure a Scheduled Log-Off for Windows XP

[Guest]

I just recently been moved into out IT Dept. My 1st project is to create a
way for our Customer Service Dpt. to enable a scheduled auto log-off.

We have representatives that do not log off at night when leaving and when
we do the back-ups they are not successful. Unfortunately, it is not the same
person, so it's not as simple as setting a policy on that computer.

It's been accessed that this is not possible with Active Directory/Group
Policy. We are considering a 3rd party client-side application that forces
log-off at a set time - this must be done on the client side, not the server.

If this is successful, we will roll it out to the entire company.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Eric Renken]

One easy way would be to schedule the shutdown command if they are running
Windows XP, you can even run this remotely against a computer.

Locally logoff in 5 seconds:
shutdown -l -f -t 05

Remotely you would have to do a restart:
shutdown -r -m \\computer -t 05 -f

To check out more information on shutdown go to the command prompt and type
"shutdown /?".

My question would be why is your backup having problems when they are logged
in? Are they keeping some application open? If they are could logging them
off automatically cause a lose of data?

Hope this helps.

 

[Torgeir Bakken \(MVP\)]

I just recently been moved into out IT Dept. My 1st project is to create a
way for our Customer Service Dpt. to enable a scheduled auto log-off.

We have representatives that do not log off at night when leaving and when
we do the back-ups they are not successful. Unfortunately, it is not the same
person, so it's not as simple as setting a policy on that computer.

It's been accessed that this is not possible with Active Directory/Group
Policy. We are considering a 3rd party client-side application that forces
log-off at a set time - this must be done on the client side, not the server.

If this is successful, we will roll it out to the entire company.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi

I suggest that you put Psshutdown.exe (free) from SysInternals in a
scheduled task that logs off the user at a set time (or do a
shutdown/poweroff instead)

Note that from my own testing, WinXP's builtin shutdown.exe utility is
not able to log off another user than the one user that is defined as
the "task" user. This means that it is pretty useless in this scenario.

Psshutdown.exe in SysInternals's free PSTools suite does not suffer
under this limitation and is the tool I recommends to use in this case.

http://www.sysinternals.com


You can use SCHTASKS.exe to create the scheduled task, run SCHTASKS /?
in a command prompt for more help.

 

[Torgeir Bakken \(MVP\)]

One easy way would be to schedule the shutdown command if they
are running Windows XP, you can even run this remotely against
a computer.

Locally logoff in 5 seconds:
shutdown -l -f -t 05

Note that from my own testing, WinXP's builtin shutdown.exe utility is
not able to log off another user than the one user that is defined as
the "task" user. This means that it is pretty useless in this scenario.

Psshutdown.exe in SysInternals's free PSTools suite does not suffer
under this limitation and is the tool I recommends to use in this case.

http://www.sysinternals.com