Automatically lock workstation after period of inactivity

[KatherineCoombs]

Hi all,

I want workstations to automatically lock (equivalent to CTRL+ALT+DEL) after say 5 minutes of inactivity. Preferably I would like to push this policy out from the server rather than having to configure each desktop individually.

I've looked everywhere within Group Policy and can't find anything like this. Any ideas??

The domain is a Windows 2K domain, and all clients are Windows 2K or XP.

Thanks in advance,
Katherine

 

[ashpp]

Hi Katherine,

Can I just ask what kind of environment are you running and what exactly do you want to do?

Do you want to log out the current user and allow somebody else to logon? If so take a look at winexit

http://lachesis.coe.ttu.edu/ppp/winexit.html

(basically a screensaver that will log out the user)

Be careful with this - remember just because there is 5 minutes of inactivity (ie. no keyboard, mouse movement) doesn't mean that there is no user activity (ie. researching a book ready to type up notes) or no cpu activity (ie. processor is rendering graphics and user is waiting for it to finish).

Even if this is in a school/university environment I would suggest 15 minutes being the absolute minimum time.


HTH

Ash.

 

[KatherineCoombs]

No, I don't want to log the user off, I just want to lock the workstation, so that they have to then pres CTRL+ALT+DEL and enter their password to unlock it, or an administrator can unlock it.

The environment is Windows 2K.

 

[ashpp]

In the GPO set a standard w2k screensaver to enabled, set the time out you want and enable "password protect the screen saver".

 

[KatherineCoombs]

well I don't want a password protected screen saver to kick in - I want the workstations to actually lock.

Besides, I would also like for each employee to be able to choose his/her own screen saver.

Cheers,
Katherine

 

[ashpp]

There is no native way of doing it in a GPO without using a screensaver.

You can use the use a idle time schedule to do it and give it the command rundll32 user32.dll,LockWorkStation - this would require manual setting up on each workstation.

Ash.

 

[dankelt]

well I don't want a password protected screen saver to kick in - I want the workstations to actually lock.

What's the difference? It does lock the computer.

Besides, I would also like for each employee to be able to choose his/her own screen saver.

Then don't specify a screen saver, just enable the password protection and timeout. Only problem with that is it won't work if no screen saver is set.

 

[merlinx]

If you go to

http://www.planet-source.code.com

there is a good amount of information pertaining to locking a system. At the same time you will notice that there are alot of things which have to be dealed with at the same time. Most important is that when someone logs in that workstation is completely free from all locks. Some of the programms or principals involved will kill the system. Becarefull when using these items.