Yesterday I switched on my XBox 360 and got the dreaded Red Ring of Death again.  Thankfully Microsoft acknowledge this issue and have given all 360 Consoles a 3 year warranty against this known problem.  So off it goes to Havant to be repaired.

I have created a pair of scripts that log when a user logs on and off to workstaions on a domain.

A basic overview of how the system works is as follows:

• A share located on an Active Directory server
• A logon script
• A logoff script
• Group Policy to launch the scripts

Setting up the system:

• Create a directory called AUDIT on a server, as it will only be containing plain text making it a compressed folder is quite beneficial.
• Create two folders within it, one called Computers and the other called Users. [fig.1]
• Share this folder as Audit [fig.2]
• Set the SHARE permissions as Everyone | Full Control [fig.3]
• Set the NTFS permissions as: [fig.4]
  • Administrators | Full Control
  • CREATOR OWNER | Special Permissions [fig.5]
  • SYSTEM | Full Control
  • Users | Write
• Compare your NTFS security with this CACLS output.  If it is different check the above steps. [fig.6]
• Edit Audit_Logon.bat and Audit_Logoff.bat to point to the newly created share on your server.
• Set-up the GPO to run the scripts for Users when they logon and logoff respectively.

Sit back and watch the text files fill up with nicely audited information.

Finally after updating Microsft ISA 2004 to SP3 and giving all the nice new logging features they have decided to release an update for ISA 2006 to give the same functionality.  The update is caled Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 Supportability Update package and can be found at the following url, Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 Supportability Update package.