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Management Tools for Computer Labs?
dorko72 asks: "I have been put in charge of setting up a small computer lab (30 workstations) for a local community. The benefactor is providing the hardware (dell workstations and one server) as well as the operating system for these systems (Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 Advanced Server) All the equipment is used, but not too old. I would like to find out what some of you guys use to monitor and manage the lab usage (ie provide realtime stats of which station is in use, etc). I would plan to set these machines in a Windows domain using Win2k Advanced Server as the controller via Active Directory. There must be some way to access AD and find out who is logged in to what machine in the domain. Any suggestions or ideas would be much appreciated."
This isn't quite what you're asking about but I figured I'll give you some useful information. I put in some security hardware called Centurion Guard at my library. I must say, if you're worries about malicious conduct on the computers, either viri or people sabotaging systems (damn teenagers), I suggest you consider it. Basically it keeps a partition of itself and whenever you reboot everything not on the partition (which normal users can't screw around with) is wiped and restored to it's original state. Just giving you my 2 cents.
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
Ditch windows for PXE boot LTSP MOSIX and have yourself a controlable cluster. You might want to look at: http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html Windows terminal services are another option, but, they are much less secure.
Keeping track of who used which computer at what time isn't treating users like criminals, it does the opposite in fact. When something "goes wrong" on the network or one of the workstations, it lets you narrow down the list of who could have done it; that way you can scrutinize a select few instead of treating all your users as a criminal or being forced to remove/limit access. When I was in high school the network manager had a horrible problem with one of the students installing sub 7 on various machines trying to get into the administrative side of the network. While the malicious script kiddy wasn't so bright being that the administrative computers were on a completely different physical network from the student machines, it did create a lot of trouble as far as cleaning up the mess. She had some monitoring packages installed so when the kiddy installed it again she got paged and caught him in the act. While this isn't always possible to find the one person responsible the first try, if you had something go wrong every day at 4pm you could and likely would pay more attention to who is using the systems at that time and try to find the culprit through a process of elimination.