Force hybernating laptops to logon

[Michael Sillers]

I haven't been bale to find a useable answer anywhere else so I hope someone here can help.

We have several users who never log out of their laptop computers when they take them home. We need them to run the login script at least once in a while but we don't want to cause too much disruption.

Is there any way to force them to log back in when they reconnect to our network?

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi Michael,

Do you want to force a logon from the user
reconnects to network
or
comes back from hibernation ?

If you want to force login if user comes back from hybernation then,
ContolPanel ->Power Options -> Advanced Tab
Check - Prompt for Password when computer resumes standby
This is in WindowsXP,
you should have a similar option in "Power Options" in Win 2008 also.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Murali

[Michael Sillers]

Hi Murali,

Thanks for the ideas. We'll give it a try and see what it does.

What I'm really trying to do is force the user to run the login script when they get back into the office and we're trying to do this centrally - several people have offices in remote locations so making changes on their computer is not easy. We've tried forcing logout and time limits in the active directory policies but they don't actually log the user off when the computer is not plugged into the computer.

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi Michael,

I hope you were able to solve the problem.

Refer the following link which says how you can thank the forum -
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/helptips.do?#28

Regards,
Murali

[Michael Sillers]

We tried several methods based on what you suggested but couldn't get the client to run the login script. Instead, we've opted for a method to use WMI to collect information we were using the login script for and it seems to be working very well for our purposes. We can scan all of the connected computers in our network in about 15 minutes and no one notices any impact.

I do like the idea of forcing the user to enter their password after a hybernate though - if simply for security reasons.

[Michael Sillers]

Alternate solution found - seems to be no way to force the login script to run after a computer has been unplugged from the network then plugged back in without going to commercial software.

Using WMI to collect and set client information gets around this and can be run from a server without noticeable impact.