Student 'Tracking'

[richard.thomas]

Hiyo!

For the past week or so I’ve been working on a method of tracking students logins and logouts, the day before yesterday the mySQL server survived the full day with about 1000 entries made in the day. So now I need to start work on a web GUI for this system.
Basically I’ve started this thread because I feel that you will be able to help me add more features to this system, and eventually help me test it by having it running in your school. I don’t expect this to happen for awhile as currently the system is bespoke to this school’s setup. However, because I’m hoping to use this as my final year project for university I will require a fairly large test base.

Currently the system stores the following data:
Logs Username, Computer name, Login time, logout time, reason (Timeout, or proper logout), and logon server.


A few ideas I've had for the web GUI so far are:

• Total Number of users currently logged in
• Total Number of users logged in throughout the current day
• 'Quick Search' - This will enable admin to search by username or computer name
• List ICT rooms in the school and show how many users are currently using these rooms
• Being able to 'flag' known trouble causing users and flag them up on login
• Pretty managerial type graphs to show room/computer usage
  

In the future I’m hoping to be able to overlay some of this information over a map of the school.


I’d like to hear from you any other features you feel would be useful in a system like this.

Thank you for taking the time to read this

[enjay]

It is sometimes useful to know when a particular user last logged in. Handy if they say "I tried to print the coursework at lunchtime, but the printer didn't work"...

Another report which would be useful would be to see if/how often every PC in the IT Suite and/or Library is in use, so you could see if you need more resources in those areas to cover peak times of day.

[Edu-IT]

It would be nice to see how long each person used the computer for too, without needing to work it out yourself using the login and logout time.

[kestrel1]

Maybe if it could flag up machines that are on, but not used during the day. That way resources could be moved to better locations.

[richard.thomas]

Maybe if it could flag up machines that are on, but not used during the day. That way resources could be moved to better locations.

I like the idea of that. It may also indicate that there's a fault with that machine.
I'm planning on adding something like this for wireless points later on when it gets to the putting of information onto a map.


Thanks for all your suggestions, keep them coming

[FN-GM]

I started using the database method on here. Does the job well

Log logons

[Sylv3r]

Will this just log student users or all users? (....method of tracking students logins and logouts). It would be useful if it could track all users including admin.

Thanks

[FN-GM]

You can set the script to any OU you like. We log every user on the Domain.

[Edu-IT]

Don't you find that Access starts to complain after a while and you have to create a new database for the script to store information in?

[dan400007]

The access DB is working well so far.

[Edu-IT]

The access DB is working well so far.

How long has it been running for?

[FN-GM]

Well he has 80,000 records and still going....

[richard.thomas]

I feel my thread has been hijacked a wee bit... trust someone from Rochdale.. :P

My script uses two exe, one for login and one for logout, you can put these in who evers OU you wish!!

Everything is stored in an mySQL database and has been running for a few days now, think its at about 5,000 records and querys are still at around 0.001 seconds.


The web GUI is what i'm currently focusing on now, thank you for your suggestions I'm adding these into my plan as i go along

[Quackers]

What happens if they do not logoff/shutdown , but just switch it off?

Will the logged on count not go wrong?

[Geoff]

A way round that would be to run at machine startup. Then log that startup time as the 'unclean' logoff time.

That's how PAM on linux deals with it anyway (check out the 'last' command).