And now for some thing completely different…. (VBscript to show logged on users)

Now let me start by saying I am no scripting guru, in fact apart from a few batch files and a C++ course many years ago I am a novice. However I have the ideas of how scripting / programming works and over the years have managed to throw to gather a few basic scripts.

I did not intend this blog to ever contain scripting (or at least not for a few years yet), but I came across this in work and thought others might find it useful. Now before we start this is a rehash of others work, links to there sites are at the bottom of the post and I would like to thank them for posting there work to the public.

The background to this is that I am currently working on a project to implement grid computing to process long running mathematical modelling jobs. The software CONDOR is a job scheduling application running on a server. The mathematician break there jobs up in to small chunks (maybe severely hundred jobs in total), and the CONDOR server finds available desktop PC’s they are inactive and sends the job to run on them. IF you have used “folding at home” or “Boinc” you will have been the client in the same kind of system.

Now while CONDOR can determine the user activity in terms of keyboard/mouse activity and CPU usage to decided if a computer is free to run jobs, there is no built in way to use the logged in status of the PC to control jobs. The idea is we want jobs to run when users log out of there PC’s, but stop and be prevented from running once a user logs in. To do this I needed to create a script that could return a “True” or “False” result to the question “is any one logged in to this computer”.

My first Idea was PSloggedon from Sysinternals, however this does not return a true false value and would require wrapping up in a second script to parse the output. So I decided to search around for a VB script that could do it all in one step.

This lead me to the following code,

strComputer = "servername"   ' " use "." for local computer 

Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ 
              & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _ 
              & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") 

Set colSessions = objWMI.ExecQuery _ 
    ("Select * from Win32_LogonSession Where LogonType = 10") 

If colSessions.Count = 0 Then 
   Wscript.Echo "No interactive users found" 
Else 
   WScript.Echo "RDP Sessions:"
   For Each objSession in colSessions 
     
     Set colList = objWMI.ExecQuery("Associators of " _ 
         & "{Win32_LogonSession.LogonId=" & objSession.LogonId & "} " _ 
         & "Where AssocClass=Win32_LoggedOnUser Role=Dependent" ) 
     For Each objItem in colList 
       WScript.Echo "Username: " & objItem.Name & " FullName: " & objItem.FullName 
     Next 
   Next 
End If 

Not exactly what I need but at least it will find and display the logged in users, so seems a good starting place, and easy to tidy up.

First of all we don’t want it to tell us a list of users, just return a true of false statement. This is just a case of replacing Wscript.Echo "No interactive users found" with Wscript.Echo "False" , and replacing the whole of the code under the else statment with simply Wscript.Echo "True".

Secondly this script uses the statment “LogonType = 10” from windowsecurity.com we can see that this will give us remote connections, as we want local logged on users we need to replace that with “LogonType = 2”. Ending up with the revised code below.


strComputer = "."   ' " use "." for local computer 
Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ 
           & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _ 
           & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colSessions = objWMI.ExecQuery _ 
  ("Select * from Win32_LogonSession Where LogonType = 2") 
     
If colSessions.Count = 0 Then     
  Wscript.Echo "FALSE" 
Else
  WScript.Echo "True"
  
End If

Oh and notice we needed to replace the servername with “.” as suggested. Saving this as a .vbs file and running it and a pop up box will display “True” (after all you are logged on to the PC 😉 )

And that was my script done..

Apart from the fact for it to work in CONDOR I needed it to be able to return out put to stdout, which requires it to be running under Cscript.exe (cscrfipt is command line, Wsccript will interact with windows, in this script one will out put to the command line, one will pop up the same out put but in a small window). Now there are several ways to do this, simple run it from the command line by calling it using cscript.exe c:\csccript.exe script.vbs , or you can wrap it up in a batch file. Howevver I came across a nice little trick to enable the script to check if it is run as cscript and if not switch to csccript.


Public objShell : Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
If Instr(1, WScript.FullName, "CScript", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
    objShell.Run "cscript " & chr(34) & WScript.ScriptFullName & chr(34) & " //Nologo" & chr(34), 0, False
 
    WScript.Quit
End If

Simply pasting this code above the main script, (And I also updated the Wscript.echo to be

Set objStdOut = WScript.StdOut
  objStdOut.Write "UserLoggedIn = True"  

for CONDOR reasons, and we end up with the complete code below.


Public objShell : Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
If Instr(1, WScript.FullName, "CScript", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
    objShell.Run "cscript " & chr(34) & WScript.ScriptFullName & chr(34) & " //Nologo" & chr(34), 0, False
 
    WScript.Quit
End If
strComputer = "."   ' " use "." for local computer 
Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ 
           & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _ 
           & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
set colSessions = objWMI.ExecQuery _ 
  ("Select * from Win32_LogonSession Where LogonType = 2") 
     
If colSessions.Count = 0 Then     
  Set objStdOut = WScript.StdOut
  objStdOut.Write "UserLoggedIn = False"
   
  
Else
  Set objStdOut = WScript.StdOut
  objStdOut.Write "UserLoggedIn = True"  
End If

Now run that and how ever you start it, if you don’t use Cscript.exe it will resubmit it’s self using Cscript.exe and output the result to stdout.

Now by playing around with the logonType and other bits of this code we could make it quite useful, it will return the logged on status of a remote machine if you replace the “.” with a valid remote computer name.

Well I hope that may be useful to some, and my thanks goes to those who came before me and provided the foundations, Please visit there sites to see many other great scripting examples.

VBScript – How to show logged on users?

Force Cscripe

DevilWAH

Slip Streaming XP,

Today I was upgrading some from windows 2000 to XP, and 99% of the upgrade I was able to do over the network. The only part I needed to go out to the PC was due to the network card not getting picked up correctly. While the PC is in the building next door this is not really an issue. But the next block are on some farms a mile or so from the main site.

The system I was using to install is straight forward.

First copy the i386 folder from a windows XP CD to a network drive and make it available via a share. The users who will be running the install needs read access to this folder.

Second go in to your group policy editor and create a new policy called “upgrade XP”

Edit this policy and chose User Configuration  –> Software Settings.

Right click software insulation and chose new –> package.

in the box that pops up browes to the i386 folder on the share and choses the Winnt32.msi file. Click OK.

Now when you log on to a windows 200 PC, and either the user or the PC has that GP applied to them, by going in to add/remove programs and then clicking Add new Programs, you will see the upgrade to XP insulation.

But as I said the big problem is the default XP CD does not have many network drivers and many PC’s although will run the upgrade will not be able to connect to the network, requiring a you to visit the PC’s with a pen-drive and a copy of the correct drivers.

Many years ago I remember slip streaming office on to an XP CD, and I remember at the time it was a right pain and took me for ever to get it working, requiring manually editing config files and many attempts before I got it to run. But knowing that slipstreaming drivers is possible I thought I would take a look at how things are now.

All I can say is Nlite, This tool has come on massively and even tough it has not been in active development for a while now, it still does every thing you need. Where are before slipstreaming was copy this there, edit this file, run this, copy that back there……

Now the process is simple.

Install nlite.

Copy your XP insulation CD in to a folder on the hard drive.

Run nlite and point it to the folder.

Chose what you want t0 add/remove, drivers, packages, set up default settings…

Decided if you want to build the boot-able ISO image

Click GO.

Nlite

And its all done for you…

If you still do install from disk and you find your self having to do the same tidy ups after every install, slipstreaming is a great method to automate the process.

Now I can upgrade the PC’s remotely and they pop back on to the network after a reboot to let me complete the upgrade, going to save a few miles of travel 🙂

Old but still useful.

DevilWAH