There is often a need to imply a local computer policy change on all your client computers in your network. If you are a domain administrator, you can easily use the group policy to make whatever changes you want. What if you are not a domain administrator who doesn’t have great experience working with Active Directory group policies or do not have rights to create and implement a domain group policy? Altiris can definitely help you if you get used to some of the valuable command line utilities included with the Windows 2003 resource kit tools (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17657). I am giving you an example here on how to use Altiris in preventing all the regular users on your client computers from shutting down the computers. These are the steps you need to perform:
1) Install Resource Kit tools on your computer. Copy NTRIGHTS.EXE from the location where resource kit tools are installed and placed it in the package server shared location. NTRIGHTS is a great command line that you can use to set privileges for users, administrators, power users etc. on the computers.
2) Create a Software delivery package as below:
If you look at the package location, that’s where I placed the ntrights.exe.
3) Hit the Programs Tab and create new program with the command line “ ntrights.exe -r SeShutdownPrivilege -U Users –m”
This command will prevent all users from shutting down the computer. Once the task is executed and the policy gets updated (depends on the policy update interval time or after a restart), users will see only log off option.
I will set this program to reboot the computer as soon as it runs so the policy will get effective after the reboot immediately. You can also set this run as part of your regular patch cycle and you reboot your computers during that time this will get effective.
4) Now we need to create a software delivery task to execute this. Here is the screenshot of the task I created for this and executed successfully.