[sims] Kicking Users Out

[CAM]

I need to kick all logged in users out of SIMS by 4pm today so the LA can apply a census patch. There will no doubt be stragglers or people who ignored the warnings, any tips for catching and kicking out the leftovers?

[Seb1780]

If it's patch 19945, we applied that live yesterday with no apparent harm.

[Meldrew]

It'll happen whatever you do - we 9 times out of 10, despite multiple warnings of doom if anyone is in SIMS at the specified time, we find it loaded on someone's PC which is locked and the user has gone for lunch at the local Tescos.

 

You could write a batch file that runs a pslist on all PCs with SIMS installed, looking for the pulsar.exe loaded. That would tell you who's not remembered at least...

 

Meldrew

[synaesthesia]

Impero is awesome for this if you use that - list all computers, task manager, kill pulsar.

 

Otherwise taskkill ( I think it's taskkill! ) is somethign I use from the server to remotely close the process on the machines with it left open

[vikpaw]

Taskkill or pskill

But to prove a point shutdown -I and restart them.

To find out who? I have some SQL if you want, others wise I would tasklist or pslist for it

[CyberDrac]

We use Impero to kill off pulsar and prevent its relaunch which works quite well. The remainder are virtualised and so we kick them out and set the servers to not let anyone back in again.

[FN-GM]

The easy way would be to simply reboot the server.

[sparkeh]

Depending on how LA apply the patch: Shutdown SQL service, make db local access only, bring SQL service back up and Bob's your Uncle, connections are broken and no new connection can't be made from anywhere but the server.

 

(Remember to reverse this though when the job is done).

[vikpaw]

The easy way would be to simply reboot the server.

The client will keep trying to reconnect if the server disappears and the user is inactive. Unless the user keeps trying to work and encounters an exception they won't be thrown out.

Since the introduction of the home page widgets, the machine just reconnects and you can't tell whether someone is actually doing something or they just left it logged in.

So after rebooting the server / or just cycling the SQL service you still need to intervene to stop the users connecting, either by making it local access only, or blocking the network path.

 

I used to kill the process then remove permissions to the S drive, so they can't access the central connect.ini

 

Once i used some command that only allowed single user mode - but the logged in clients, whoever made it first, would beat me to it, and lock me out! That was the homepage doing it again.

[synaesthesia]

(I should point out that I do the polite thing and send out a message to each PC beforehand using CC4 management console in that case! Just so they can't say they were not warned)

[CAM]

No Impero here. Also the LA told me I cannot kick people off the server, so this could get interesting tonight as I know someone won't have listened to the warnings!

[vikpaw]

Rubbish. Of course you can kick them off. Get management to okay it, if they want Census sorted.

Use PSkill if you have to, though be warned, a couple of the PS tools get caught by anti-virus and blocked / deleted.

 

If you're got read only SQL access this code will tell you who to target

 

use master;

select distinct sysprocesses.loginame,
/* sysprocesses.spid, */
sysprocesses.hostname,
sysdatabases.name,
/* sysprocesses.nt_username, */
sysprocesses.login_time,
sysprocesses.status,
sysprocesses.memusage,
sysprocesses.dbid
from sysprocesses


join sysdatabases on sysprocesses.dbid = sysdatabases.dbid


where sysdatabases.name = 'sims' OR sysdatabases.name = 'fms'


order by sysdatabases.name, sysprocesses.loginame

[sparkeh]

Rubbish. Of course you can kick them off.

Agreed, did they give any reasoning?