Question

Is there anything that provides system idleness ? We want to use C# to get the idle time for the system across all sessions and put the machine to logout if nobody is using the machine for X minutes.

any idea about this …..

Answer 1

If you are running a terminal server this can be done through group polices or through terminal services configuration

Server 2003

Server 2008

Server 2008 R2

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To log off a desktop session you will need to have a program that runs in the background (this will not work as a system service, it must be running as part of the interactive session) that will check the login time with GetLastInputInfo, it then can call ExitWindowsExto log off.

class Program
{
    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    struct LASTINPUTINFO
    {
        public static readonly int SizeOf = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(LASTINPUTINFO));

        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)]
        public int cbSize;
        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)]
        public UInt32 dwTime;
    }


    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    static extern bool GetLastInputInfo(ref LASTINPUTINFO plii);

    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
    static extern bool ExitWindowsEx(uint uFlags, uint dwReason);

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        bool running = true;
        while (running)
        {
            if (GetLastInputTime() > 60 * 15) //15 min idle time
            {
                ExitWindowsEx(0, 0);
                running = false;
            }
            Thread.Sleep(1000 * 60); //check once per min.
        }
    }

    static int GetLastInputTime()
    {
        int idleTime = 0;
        LASTINPUTINFO lastInputInfo = new LASTINPUTINFO();
        lastInputInfo.cbSize = Marshal.SizeOf(lastInputInfo);
        lastInputInfo.dwTime = 0;

        int envTicks = Environment.TickCount;

        if (GetLastInputInfo(ref lastInputInfo))
        {
            int lastInputTick = (int)lastInputInfo.dwTime;

            idleTime = envTicks - lastInputTick;
        }

        return ((idleTime > 0) ? (idleTime / 1000) : 0);
    }

}

I needed to do this once and had trouble finding sources and this may help someone else who is goggleing this kind of question. So even though I am answering, I am down voting the question.

UPDATE: Here is a technique to get this to run as a service