Workstation being used ?

[oliverm]

Hi,

I've been asked whether we can determine when a laptop is being used by an employee of a client of ours. They know we can do all kinds of things with zabbix, so wonder if we can do this.

They want to know whether the user is using their laptop whilst out and about (he makes claims of doing work, when his output doesnt match, and has just insisted on a new laptop).

Any suggestions how we could do this? One of the main problems is that the user moves around the place, and so won't have a fixed IP. I thought about getting around this by using some kind of dynamic dns updating util on his machine.

Thoughts ?

Olly

[rolandsym]

ideas

Could use zabbix active agents which don't require IP just the same name that is in the zabbix_configd.conf

Also,
What constitutes work? Running Email? A particular program? On windows you can poll for those items. So when he is connected to the internet it will send stuff up to zabbix.

Just some ideas..

Rolandsym

[nelsonab]

I don't know if the x86 architecture is still the same in this regard, but the keyboard was tied to an interrupt at one point. If it still is figure out which interrupt it's tied to and monitor how many times it's triggered if you can. Every time the user presses a key an interrupt should be triggered. Thus you can approximate keystrokes. Mouse may be harder to get as it could be on the PS2, USB or Serial (old school) ports. Each one of them uses a different interrupt and someone please correct me if I'm wrong, I think USB is dynamic in it's interrupt.

This is the best way I can think of for how to approximate if someone is "working." I will not work if the user is doing a lot of reading and mouse clicks as part of their work.