Remotely logon to mutiple computers

[yasdnil]

Hi there, this is my first post, hope it's a good one

I work at a school in which we have primary students using computers. They all use the same login depending on what year they're in. The problem is, senior school students have figured out the passwords (they're very simple! any harder and the primary kids have trouble).

We're trying to think of possible solutions and one is to have the teacher login all the computers for the primary students before they come to class, that way we can make the password however hard we like.


SO... my question is, does anyone know of a program/script/command that will login a group of computers with defined login credentials?


Thanks in advance,

Lindsay

 

[fattony]

tough one...how many stations are we talking about here?
i mean there are apps that will do an automatic login without a prompt, then i guess you can lock the stations, but someone still needs to unlock them all

i'll see what i can find

 

[yasdnil]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

We're looking at 25 computers (give or take).

Do these apps login on the local machine's startup, rather than being controlled from another machine? The lab in question is used by all students at different times, so that could be a problem.

What would be ideal is a program that the teacher can run from their laptop that logs the computers in there and then. I don't know if that's possible though?

One solution we were looking at was simply restricting the login hours of the primary classes to match when they are in computer classes. But sometimes students use computers for other reasons than just computer classes. We're trying to find a solution that means the least amount of work for us of course.

Thanks for your help

 

[fattony]

logon is kinda out of the question, it's secured pretty well, i did find an article which allows you to remotely unlock the stations tho

so let's say you create one common domain account and use it on all the workstations, you create an AD complexitily required password for it as well

then the teacher would execube this script, which you will probably need to modify further to include all the stations in some kinda .vbs or .bat file to make things easier, now the stations are unlocked, challenge still remains that someone needs to lock them up...you could setup a screensaver which needs a password to unlock after let's say 5mins of idle time

otherwise make it routine for the students to lock the boxes before class is out or the teach needs to lock them up

i hope you're good at coding, cuz i'm not lol...one more thing, this is completely unsupported and it's a hack of the o/s which you can't depend on for much longer since it will probably be patched up sooner or later

http://www.codeproject.com/system/RemoteUnlock.asp

 

[yasdnil]

Thank you for that, I'll have a look into it.

These programs that automatically login a computer with set credentials, are they easy to change back and forth with?

Right now everyone logs into our domain with their own username and password, it's only the primary kids that have the shared username/password. So any program that onlylogs in automatically won't really be suitable. But if it's something we can adjust - even with a batch script - that could just work.

What were the names of some of these apps?

Thanks again, I definitely appreciate your help. That "remote unlock" guide itself will prove useful.

 

[yasdnil]

Actually, your post got us thinking about the automatic logon registry settings. We're going to fiddle with that a bit, we have some ideas. So don't go to any trouble to reply to my previous message just yet. I'll let you know if our "crazy plan" works

 

[yasdnil]

Well, we've scrapped our idea just because it has some flaws. But I'm going to post what we had planned to do because someone else might be able to use it.

In theory the idea will work. The teacher runs a batch file that executes a registry file on a Lab of computers, restarts them and they login under the pre-set username/password. Then a login script (or another batch later initiated by a teacher) wipes the registry entries so that the next time those computers are restarted they won't login automatically.

It's big and silly but with a little bit of work it could have been decent.

The reason it's not so good for us:

a) it would do this to every computer in a lab - sometimes students from other classes will use spare computers to do homework; therefore it's a bit of a security risk: the teacher would have to make sure they restart the computer before using it, so they don't use the primary login.

or

b) the teacher would have to edit the text files containing the computer list based on which computers will be used in that particular class.

All of a sudden it gets really fiddly. But that's only a problem because we have other students from other classes using those computers. If that weren't the case this idea should work.


So here's some more specifics about how we'd have done it.

1. Batch or VB files with a psexec command to run a batch on all machines in a lab. This batch file contains:

a) the registry entry (with the primary class username/password and autologin settings - we'd make one for each primary login)
b) a vbs script which would set a environment variable: autologin=yes (this comes into play later)
c) a restart command

Then the computers would restart and login as that particular class.

2. We would also have made a login script for all primary classes that removed those registry settings, so that on the next reboot they wouldn't login automatically.

This script would be in AD and it would simply say:

a) if the environment variable "autologin" = yes, run another .reg file that reverses those settings

A problem: the primary logins don't have the permissions to do that. So we looked at runas replacements that would encrypt passwords, etc... then we started to think "hmm maybe this isn't such a great idea anyway"

But it SHOULD work! I know it's ridiculously long and stupid but if you work at a private school in Australia like us you'll understand how desperate we are to find a solution that doesn't involve spending money

Hopefully that made some sense and is of some use to someone down the track.

 

[behrendtb]

This will work!

http://www.askbj.com/progs/RCLogon_Setup.exe


I had the same problem, and this was my solution, the actual dos programs are not mine, I just created the front end.

If anyone ever finds a commercial product that does the same thing let me know.


Since I am here i am also going to sugest: http://www.networklookout.com/admin_pro.htm

The teachers at my school have really taken a likeing to it.

Bjorn
Tech Director
Proctor School District