Bedtime

As it's the holidays, the kiddies would stay on the PCs all night. To get them into bed, stern measures are needed:

First you need to set the accounts they are using (you're not letting them be admins, are you?) to have fixed logon hours. You can't do this through the GUI on XP Home, so you need a batch file of commands like this one to set times when it's possible to log on. Call it accounts.cmd -- you'll need to re-run it when anything changes:

net user mmadson /times:sunday,08:00:-21:00;monday-saturday,09:00-21:00;saturday,08:00-21:00

The /passwordreq:no directive can be useful here too.

Unfortunately, Windows won't enforce that logoff. (A domain would, but Windows itself will not.) So the second step is to force it. There would be any number of ways to deal with this, but I chose the ugliest: run the the Sysinternals psshutdown command at bedtime. I chose to run it from a command file so that I could get a log. Put this text into enforcer.cmd, make the obvious modifications and set it up as a Windows scheduled task. (In the control panel, under Performance and Maintenance.)

@echo off
echo "-start-" >>d:\at\log.txt
date /t >>d:\at\log.txt
time /t >>d:\at\log.txt
d:\at\psshutdown -o -f  >>d:\at\log.txt 2>&1
echo "-end-" >>d:\at\log.txt

I set it to run twenty minutes past the last log on time. Hey presto! Instant rage from the younger generation.

The obvious improvement is to only log off console sessions which are members of the kiddiewinks group. It's really annoying when it logs ME off! I think I could script that up, but I'm too idle.