locations

I recently used Locations Project and found it to be a simple and useful script to keep track of user logins. It allows you to view the locations from which users have logged into your machine. I was inspired by a similar script mentioned in the Perl For System Administration book from O Reilly.

The script can be customized to display all the users who have logged into your box from more than three distinct locations. This parameter can be adjusted according to your preferences with the '--count=N' argument. Alternatively, you can use the 'locations --show' command to generate a report about all the hosts from which all users have logged in from.

Please keep in mind that this script requires a GNU last command and is written in Perl. If you're running a Debian GNU/Linux system you will likely already have it installed. The presence of the '-a' flag to last is necessary for the hostname to be correctly identified without truncation.

Installing it is easy. Simply download the tarball and run 'make install' or install it from the apt-get repository. After installing it, create a crontab entry either in your personal file, or under the system-wide /etc/cron.{daily, weekly} directory to have it run daily or weekly.

Locations Project is easy to use, the following options are supported and self-explanatory:

- --count N: Set the maximum number of expected login locations.
- --help: Show the help text.
- --host host: Show all users who logged in from the given host.
- --list: List all users and the locations from which they logged in.
- --user login: Show all hosts from which the given user logged in.
- --version: Show the version number of this script.

Overall, I found Locations Project to be a useful tool for keeping track of user logins that is customizable and easy to install and use.