Tracking users logging in and out

Yan Seiner yan at cardinalengineering.com
Thu Jan 24 16:02:04 GMT 2002


Hmmm.

I don't see how you can discern the "intent" of the user.  Windows
logins are share based.  If a user logs out intentionally, you want to
log that.  If, however, he is logged out due to inactivity or because he
has dicsonnected from a share like a printer, you don't want to log
that.  

I check for active logins a simple inetd script on a specific port which
simply spews forth a list of IPs which currently have samba
connections.  It would be trivial to change it to return user logins.

Wht I do is scan a samba server every 10 minutes, and look in the utmp
file for any open connections.  If I find any, the user is still live. 
If I don't, he is logged out.

Also, I've run some very informal testing, and an inactive share stayed
connected overnight.  This is with Win98 and ME.

I don't know under what conditions an active connection would be
connected and disconnected many times an hour.

--Yan

Antony Healey wrote:

> 
> All very good ideas, unfortunately the following happens...
> 
> For utmp, preexec and postexec, they are share based. Shares are not
> persistant and the user gets "logged out" after a period of time, until they
> use ("log in to") it again. This ends up meaning that during the course of 1
> hour behind a computer, the user could appear to log in and out many many
> times.
> 
> We're also running Tru64, which doesn't support PAM that I'm aware of.
> 
> Any other suggestions would be great!
> 
> Regards,
> Antony.


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