SBS 2003 and determining RDP usage

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Hello everyone. I have a friend who owns a small business. He has a SBS 2003 server and has a few employee’s who RDP into work some times. They accomplish this through the SBS 2003 Remote Web Workplace link when you go to their employee login web site that’s available on the Internet. My friend is wondering if there’s a way to determine RDP usage by these employees. He’s thinking when they log in, how long they’re on, etc. I have no idea if SBS 2003 has some way of reporting this information. Does anyone know?

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As far as I know SBS does not have this sort of monitoring available so you would have to build a solution yourself.

As far as solutions go maybe you could write logon/logoff scripts that run on the workstations that write to a txt/csv file on a sbs network share. All the script would have to do is echo the date/time/user and you would have a pretty reasonable idea of logon/logoff times.

Good thing about CSV is you can import to Excel, formula/reporting then

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Josh, I like your idea. Let’s talk about that. I’m not sure where to start, or in other words how to write such a script/batch file. Could you help with that?

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I’ll be able to give you a basic example and you should be able to modify it to your environment. So here’s a start.

You’ll need to create a network server share with the appropriate permissions,

Create a logon/logoff script aka userlogon.bat / userlogoff.bat

Within those files you’ll have something like this:

Code:

echo Login From: %COMPUTERNAME%, User Name: %USERNAME%, Date: %DATE%, Time: %TIME% >> U:monitoring%username%.csv

Giving you an output something like this,

Code:

Login From: PC1	 User Name: Josh B	 Date: 2010/03/28	 Time: 21:05:12.80 
Logoff From: PC1	 User Name: Josh B	 Date: 2010/03/28	 Time: 21:05:55.80 

You could store this in a central share or send the file to the users local home directory. As you can see by using simple environment variables we can get some dynamic values such as the computer name / username / date / time etc.

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This is great. I’ll give it a try and let you know how it works! Thanks for your help.

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