Remote Administration
 

Hi all. Now am having a problem with my users always changing their ip addresses and this has forced me to think of how i can remotely shutdown their machines so that the legit machine can have its ip back. So does anyone have a utility in mind or a script which can perform the above task ?
Most of the users are running windows machines while on the other end i have my red hat 9 box.
Thanks

Well, you can try installing TightVNC on the remote machines, and then VNC to the windows machine and shut it down remotely.

However, the whole thing falls flat if you don't know the IP address of the target Windows machine you want to remotely shut down... kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.

I don't know much about DNS, but there's got to be some way that when a machine connects to the network that the DNS can pick up the ip address and match its hostname to it. That way, you could then just 'ping' by hostname or connect directly by hostname and shut the computer down remotely.

You could also reserve IP addresses to computers that really need it and assign a range of IP addresses to computers that "come and go"

Remove the accounts from the local Administrators group, then they will not be able to change the IP address. This will also avoid getting viruses.