"Not shuting down the PC monitor"

I would like to find a way to discover which users leave their pc on during the night.
The network is based on Windows 2000 servers
Does anybody know how I can do this?

 

I guess I/we don't understand the question. Maybe "we" do, but I don't. I have recently completed a small home network and have a distributed computing project going for which I leave both computers running 24/7, but shut down monitors when I wish(Often on the secondary and nightly on the primary). Maybe some clarification would help. BTW, I know nothing of Win2K. So this is strictly a FWIW.

 

explanation

What I want to do is:
In my company the policy is that all users should turn off their pc when finished for the day. The problem is that many do not do this, and I would like to find a way to discover which users these are, so I can inform them that they should turn off their pc's.

I though off creating a batch file that would ping all ip's and I could check which IP's replied. The problem with this is that we have a great number of pc's and a very big DHCP scope, so the pinging would take a great deal off time.

 

Hi Buda. Will have to wait on an answer from a more knowlegable person than me to shed light on this. I wish you luck.

 

Buda,
This is how I addressed this same problem where I work.
created a directory on a network drive. Populated this directory
with tiny log files named with the logon ids of our users. Ran a batch file from our automatic software distribution (it runs on startup) that deleted the appropriate log file. By reviewing
the remaining files, you can determine who is not shutting down.

 

In Win NT 4 if you open the Windows Exlporer and click on the "Map Network Drive" button on the toolbar or go Tools>Map Network Drive it shows you a list of all the workstations, etc. that are connected to the network. Should be similar in Win2K.

 

If you happen to have the old NT Server Manager, you can tell what PC's are powered on. The greyed out workstations and servers mean they are off (or no longer in service) and the "highlighted" (lack of a better term) ones are on.

I wish Active Directory Users and Computers had this ability.

 

I use a small program called Network View, if I remember right it's only about $15 for the registered version, but you can try it out for free and it's easy to use.


http://www.networkview.com

 

Buda - the "ping" thing would work fine.

Just get a list of all active computer names by piping the output from Net View to a file and then ping the computer names from that. Send those results to another file and you could easily see which PCs responded and which did not.

In fact, if you fed the second file to a spreadsheet or, better yet, to a database, you could get results pretty quickly and have a written record in case (make that WHEN) someone tried to dispute your findings.

 

I would like to thank you all for your replies.
I finnaly created some batch files and schedulled them to run at midnight every night.
The general idea is that I ping all registered (by using net view as newt suggested) machines on the network, save the results to a text file and filter the results to find which computers replied.

If anybody is interested in these batch files I would be happy to send them a copy.