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."

Comments

A bit off topic

[john_is_war]

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.

Lab management software

[altp]

Dameware : manage the machines from a remote location.

netusers.exe and some perl or python thrown in to deal with the output of netusers. You can get all your user stats and stuff from this.

With those tools you can develop some scripts to track usage, avaiable comptures and throw it all up on a web site.

Short list

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the short list of the few tools that you will find necessary while managing a public computing lab.

1. Strong locks for the outer doors of the lab.
2. Clippers capable of severing all keyboard and mouse cables.
3. A sturdy, 36" Crowbar.
4. Cheap bourbon.

Long and painful experience has shown that management software and administrative tools are interchangeable luxuries at best (and are more often nothing more than time-consuming placebos). While you are certain to receive many suggestions for that type of product, I am certain that the list above represents the absolutely indispensible core of any competent adminstrator's toolkit.

Needed: One linux box

[omega9]

No, seriously...

Bring up your favorite distro. The important bits of immediate concern are Squid and syslog. Prevent direct access to the net from the client machines and force them to go through the proxy using a GPO in ActiveDirectory. Configure Squid how you like, but best to at least add the capability to block certain sites and prevent certain file types from being downloaded:

acl hosts_deny dstdomain "/etc/squid/blocked_sites.txt"
acl filetypes urlpath_regex -i "/etc/squid/filetypes.txt"

http_access deny filetypes
http_access deny hosts_deny

List the domains to block in /etc/squid/blocked_sites.txt. List the file extentions to block in /etc/squid/filetypes.txt in regex fashion (something like \.(exe)$ to block .exe files). Not a complete fix, but a good quick way to safeguard web access.

Now run over to sourceforge and grab ntsyslog. This handy tool exports your Event Viewer logs to a remote syslog server. It installs as a service and it's a cinche to setup. Stick is on your domain controller. On your Linux box add a line like the following to syslog.conf (for sysklogd):

user.alert -/var/log/domain.log

By default, ntsyslog uses user.alert, but you can change that to whatever you like. Also make sure your syslog is configured to receive messages from remote clients. Now, in your default domain policy on the domain controller configure it to audit logon events as well as account logon events, successes and failures for both.

Now you've got web access managed by a central proxy with full logging and minimal blocking abilities and all logon success/failures being reported to Event Viewer on the DC and forwarded to the syslog. If you want to see who is logged into a machine at any given time you can either quickly parse the logs or use something like NetUsers or LoggedOn.

Popular local opinion says that you're likely to have more problems/attacks with/against your Windows server. Having your Event Viewer messages forwarded means you can diagnose problems in the event something happanes to that server. You'll probably want to at least MRTG the Linux box to get an idea of bandwidth usage too. Then enjoy whippin' up your own set of shell scripts to play with your logs (hint: real-time monitoring)!