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Do Any Companies Power Down at Night?
An anonymous reader writes "My Health Sciences Campus has about 8,000 desktop computers, and on any given night about half of them are left on. I know this because I track all the MAC addresses in case there is a virus outbreak. Aside from the current fad of 'being green', has anyone had any success in encouraging users to power-down at night? You could potentially eliminate running bots, protect yourself from the next virus outbreak, keep your data safe, etc. Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?"
I won't go into the green topic. But here's a suggestion: Why don't you just shut down ethernet switches and routers at night? That would be just as effective at halting propagation of virii/bots, and would be much easier to effect.
:-)
And improved employee morale could result as well, since what would be the point of working late?
Employ strict log-on hours and use a tool for remote shutdown/startup from the monitoring station.
..::ALWAYS : watching::..
During the week machines are left up to push automatic updates (5 minutes of downtime, times 10k employees, is about $80,000 of billable time). At weekends they get shut off either manually or under remote control.
Beep beep.
It's probably smarter to track IP addresses unless you control all the switches :)
Common wisdom (which may or may not be actual wisdom) suggests that powering up/down of computer power supplies is one of the largest sources of "wear" on computers nowadays, and so it's best to avoid that (replacing system components and increased costs in the industries to make this possible should be factored into eco-costs as well). Having systems go to sleep to various degrees presumably gets one much of the way towards being more eco-friendly without so much of this wear. That said, presumably a rigourous analysis on the topic would provide more reliable guidance.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Don't people typically perform backups/updates at night?
A lot of places require machines to be on overnight because that is when automated update, monitoring and scanning tasks can run without impacting users. Of course, the machine could be configured to automatically shut down when this is finished. Actually shutting down is typically highly inconvenient since the machine loses state due to 30 years of bad OS design when this happens but a suspend-to-disk mode is a viable alternative.
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No. That's when we run anti-virus and other scans on the desktops.
And push out patches and other updates.
I would go with a reward plan. You could do something like give the top three most energy efficient people a gift certificate to the campus eatery (or whatever really). Calculate how much money is saved (out of everyone participating) and use part of that money to create a pool for the prizes. (It seems like for a large enough group of people, the energy and maintenance costs would reduce considerably, but I wouldn't really know ;)
I know I would definitely turn off my work PC every night if I got a free lunch!
I work for a small company of about 20 persons. Some of us have two machines that we use regularly throughout the day, but not all -- so we probably have around 30 computers. Unless there's a need to leave a machine on all evening or weekend (rendering, maintenance, etc...), I try to shut them down as I leave for the day. Any machine that won't be left on to render is set to enter a low-power mode (standby, sleep, etc...) after an hour or two. It's not for security, nor any desire to "go green" -- the machines just don't need to be running all night.
If I only had a moose...
It's time that all large campuses configured their systems hibernate automatically, if left unused for 30 minutes.
Really, there is no reason NOT to use the power management settings built into the OS.
I'm at a university and many of my colleagues leave their machines on overnight because they sometimes need access to their machine, either to retrieve a file or to run a program. If the IT folks provided everyone with a wake-on-lan script then everyone could turn off their machine. For years this has seemed to me like a no-brainer.
Is there some security or other downside I'm not aware of? Is WOL not reliable?
We don't completety power down any of our desktop machines. Users log off in the evening, and machines go to standby/hibernate after enough time has elapsed. Thus, users do not have to wait in the morning till the machine boots.
Machines are woken from sleep to deploy updates, etc. Many of our desktops are able to accumulate 30 days of uptime before the next patchday.
Energy consumption is a non-issue. We don't pay much for electricity.
The rest of the infrastructure - printers, faxes, access points, etc. runs 24/7. Again, the complexity to shut them down would never be equal to the energy savings.
"Health Sciences Campus" sounds like at least a few hundred of those are grad students and postdocs chained to their desks by their PIs...
I'm not sure whether your definition of "powering-down" includes sleep; it seems like reasonable default (or unchangeable) power settings should be adequate to address your concerns. Admittedly, that's easier done in a company than in the free-for-all of academic computing.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
...nobody sleeps.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
I did this a while back, the trick is some machines are 24/7 others are 9-5 ers. I coordinated with dept heads to identify what entire departments could be shut down then scripted a prompt to fire at 7:00pm to look for any user feedback, working late crowd, then 30 minutes later do a shutdown if no response was received. This took care of most machines. I never got to the mixed departments, greener pastures called.
Can you ping those machines? They may be sleeping but powering the NIC for WoL. That leaves them drawing very little power and immune to any IP-based attacks.
-Peter
Shutting down at the end of the day and powering up the next morning increases the probability of HDD failure. It's better for the HDD to run all the time than to cold boot every morning.
I work for a large blue chip company and we have a strict policy of powering down at night (including monitor). We regularly audit the records to ensure the machine is powered down and users who are not are requested to always remember. A few users take a few reminders in order to do so and I have heard every excuse under for why they left it on and while some are valid the majority (95%) are not. Our reasons for pushing this policy is purely to save money and reduce unnecessary running time of the equipment. However we are in a position where only laptops users have VPN access so if they need to login to the network from home they already have their laptop with them. If we had open VPN access to desktop users I am sure we would see a lot of users leaving their computer on so that they can RDP into it over VPN.
It took about 6 months before we were at a realistic level. We have 633 desktops on our site so there is normally always a valid reason for one or two to be left on (valid reasons being batch copy, verify or processing of files). For those interested we have had a reduction in the amount of equipment failure (HDD mainly) as well as pretty good cost savings for power. Not to mention running greener (which regardless of if you believe in global warming or not is good).
Regardless of what you want to have happen, the machines should be configured to do it by the system administrator, rather than naively hoping that users will do it on their own. If you use part of the night to do backups and updates, configure them to turn off after that - it doesn't take the _entire_ night. If you want to go with the arguments about wear on the machines, you can at the very least suspend to RAM and save quite a bit of power, without even adding startup time in the morning (although you could WOL all of them right before office hours anyway).
The company I work for uses a program on each machine to shut it down at 7pm unless the user is there to push a button to stop it, it is then turned back on at 6am (using Wake On Lan I assume). PCs are of course left off on weekends and holidays as well. It is possible for a user to request an exemption if the PC is used for computing tasks that need to run over night/weekends.
I tend to leave the computer on overnight, but with things like monitor power-down and CPU idling enabled. When it's not doing anything it drops about 90% of it's power consumption after 15 minutes, and even when working with the monitor off (eg. running the nightly backup) it's still running at less than 50% of full power. If I power it off, by comparison, it can't run it's virus scan, backup, update check and the like overnight and has to do those things while I'm trying to use it during the day. Plus there's wear and tear to consider, I've noticed that the office computers that get turned off and on every day tend to fail and need replacing several times before mine (that stays on all the time) has a failure.
So my preference is to leave computers running but with power-saving features set to minimize power without shutting things down. This means hard drives continue to spin but the CPU goes into low-power idle mode. The monitor goes to suspend mode (beam and deflection power is off but the circuits and coils are kept warm), not powered-down completely. That seems to be the best balance between reducing power consumption, allowing it to run maintenance operations overnight and minimizing wear and tear and thermal stress on the components. If management absolutely insists on ignoring those last two in favor of the first, wake-on-LAN is essential to allow nightly maintenance to happen.
You could always roll out a job on the computer to automatically reboot or shutdown the computer at a certain time.
... but now IT has loaded so much crap on it ("desktop agents" [ie apps that spy on me], antivirus, patches, etc) that it is fully 15-20 minutes after turning it on before it is usable. So now I never turn it off. I did the hibernation thing for awhile, but then it stopped working for some reason and I haven't been able to fix it. And if I ask IT to fix it, their solution is always the same for every problem - wipe the machine - a tad inconvenient for me, but pretty efficient for them I suppose. Sigh.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
S3 standby can be woke remotely if need be, and on new computers it only takes a few watts.
Gone!
For many users, there is a productivity loss upon reboot (beyond just the time waiting for it to boot). The reason is that the arrangement of open apps, documents, and so forth, contains "information" about what they are currently working on. This includes things like open web-pages, rough notes in a text document (that the user may never save), and the specific position of windows. Having to reboot means the user must save all this data (including saving a browser session, etc.), and re-organize things when the computer comes back online. Having a computer reboot without a user expecting it can ruin a certain amount of their work and organization... In much the same way that "organizing" a person's desk by clearing all their (messy?) stacks of papers into a filing cabinet can kill their productivity.
Now, having said all that, you may say "tough crap! The user should learn to save all their files and re-open them the next morning." The question, from a company standpoint, is whether the energy savings are worth the impact on user productivity.
As others have pointed out, sleep and hibernate functions are a better middle-ground. (It would also be cool if Windows could actually remember the arrangement of open apps in your session, like KDE does.)
We're currently rolling out software to shut down all our machines enterprise wide if they are left logged off, or if users do not respond to a prompt after 7PM. The main reason for doing this is saving power. There are AD groups for certain machines that need to be excepted from this as we have developers and such that do overnight compiles and so on. Seems to be one of those rare good ideas the company has done.
Since I pay 2,2Kr(0,4$?) pr Kilowatt, I turn of everything I don't use.
At work, we are told to turn the PCs off when we go home, but I mostly leave my Lenovo T60 on since the login procedure with all it scripts takes 5 minutes.
They have someone who walks around from time to time and place stickers on the machines, after work hours, if the machine was left on.
But I still leave it on though, because of the incredible long boot / login time.
It shouldn't be necessary to leave machines up and running all the time just to be able to push updates or run virus scans (etc., etc.). That's what Wake-On-LAN is for. It allows you to put a computer to sleep, then wake it remotely when it is specifically addressed to (say, by a remote administrator). Sure, it needs to be hardware supported on the motherboard, and the BIOS needs to be set up just so, but it isn't that hard to implement on a new machine that you need to configure for the company anyway.
I wanted to set up Wake-on-LAN on my work computer - so that I could put it to sleep, but still access a shared drive when I was away from the desk or remoting from home. I got zero help from IT - the first two people I spoke to hadn't even heard of it. I guess they didn't want one oddball network device out of 40,000 on campus.
Any sysadmins want to chime in on the pros and cons of implementing Wake-On-LAN company-wide?
Among other projects, I worked on the power supply controls for the Cray Super Dragon. No, you probably never heard of it, but it became the Sun ES-10K.
This box had variable voltage power supples which required me to adjust them from cold start. I had to calibrate A/D, take samples, tweak, etc all through JTAG and cumulatively it was quite slow. Like over an hour.
My manager was not impressed, I shrugged and said "who turns these off?" - and the marketing droid/product manager said "they do in Japan". Fine. The hardware people were nice enough to give me multiple JTAG lines and power up time shrank to acceptable limits.
I have never been certain if this was a "Spinal Tap" riff or it was really true.
Does anyone know of any studies about HDD and other hardware failure rates when powering down as opposed to sleep/hibernation/etc? It seems like everyone has their own antecdotal evidence but I haven't seen anyone show any kind of proof beyond that about what is actually best for the hardware.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
I'm a part time administrator for a small school computer lab, as well as the full time job of maintaining my family computers. (My family manages to click on the stupidest things...) The nice part about having full admin access to the lab is I can have the machines shut down automatically at a set time, and standby often. Users have no control over the settings, and there is minimal argument over it. However, the second you give the user any freedom, then they will start monkeying with the settings. More often than not, users are extremely impatient, and don't want to wait for the computer to get out of standby and then have to log in. They like the machine to be sitting there, ready to use.
I think a nice method of showing users how much they are saving is by making a small script that takes the system uptime, the known power usage of the computer, and the going electrical rate, and showing how many $$'s have been used by leaving the computer on. Or, for bigger institutions rather than individuals, translate that into how many trees or whatever have been destroyed. (Even if there is no correlation, make one up. Users are stupid.)
Another option is either thin embedded machines during off hours (so they can do web browsing etc, but not wasting the big wattage) or just equip the computers w/those motherboards that have instant-on linux distros, with firefox. 9/10 times people use computer labs are for the internet anyways, if 90% of computers in labs were power efficient terminals, this would be such a trivial problem.
I worked for a very large (top-3) pharmaceutical for years. They always asked employees to shut off their computers at night when they went home.
Then one day, they sent out a campus-wide email telling people to leave their computers on all night and over the weekend. They used the CPU cycles to run high-performance scientific computing jobs, saving the cost of buying a supercomputer.
Of course, not every company has a need for spare CPU cycles. This place did a lot of protein-shape searches etc..
In the comments and original message there are the following: -- Aside from the current fad of 'being green' -- -- I won't go into the green topic. -- -- nor any desire to "go green" -- In general this "community" is a group of technically minded people who are not opposed to putting science ahead of PR and marketing. Why on earth would such a group be so afraid of something because it is green. We all have to share the planet and I'm guessing most of us are not becoming billionaires by destroying it, so why is it such a problem for so many of you.
We're implementing a GPO to actually sleep the monitors instead of activating a screensaver. You need the PCs on for autoupdates, WOL is a nice idea but isn't reliable.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The CS department at the college I went to used to turn off all the PCs at night but now has them set up to start doing scientific calculations during the times when the labs are closed. They use power during this time, but it's not wasted.
An interesting question is how much power does the computer consume when its monitor is switched off, and the harddisk is idle or spun down? Is it large enough to make a serious dent in the organization's energy bill?
I leave my computer on for a couple reasons. One is that if I'm in the middle of doing something and its time to call it a day, its easier to resume that if I leave everything as is. The second is that I may get paged to fix something and would need to remotely log into my computer from home, which requires it to be on.
I suppose if you could find a way to remotely hibernate a computer and remotely unhibernate it then you could potentially save on the electric bill.
I realized just as I clicked that the subject had a misspelled word in it. Unfortunately, clicking on stop doesn't stop the processing on the server, just the client and there is no way to edit once something is posted that I know of, so we all have to look at discusting instead of disgusting. Deal with it...
This's very interesting, but there's another point.
Being in a hw and sw developer company, our desktop are always full with compiler, debuggers and all sort of stuff a heavy developer runs to do his work.
Shutting down means that we must spend at least 10/15 minutes in the morning to have all the desktop setup as was the day before.
how that can impact? I know that there's suspend and hibernate but due to hw issues (and OS issue, if using linux and we do), not always
is possible...
I was there.
Its a shame that companies really dont believe in what they say... but what do you expect... its business.
There are some real true green efforts out there by a handful of the tech companies but in reality... Green is just being tossed around to make everyone feel good about themselves.
Nothing was more ridiculous than watching NBC turn off their studio lights during their halftime show of a football game, claiming "NBC is going green"
I studied this recently for our company. We have about 5000 machines in our organization. It is a relatively easy thing to do, especially with a management system in place (Landesk, Altiris, Kaseya, even just AD in this case). 90+% of the machines do not need to be on 24/7, and it saves lots of money (I care for the environment, but seems like they only care about money). My suggestion was to tackle the PCs first, but also immediately focus on automating HVAC and lighting afterwards. There would truly be a market for a small robust wireless interface that could integrate with existing infrastructure to allow for remote server control. Think Zwave, X10, Insteon, but more secure and reliable in commercial buildings. Just stick them in line with your thermostats and lighting circuit breakers and you're set. But everything out there is too expensive to implement. It's a shame really, lighting and A/C that stays on all night... Each trumps the power usage of our collective PCs by a lot.
I always power down my systems at night. have worked in companies where no one else does this. I have even had coworkers chide me for doing this. I even power down my Macs, instead of putting them to sleep. I am not an environmentalist or "greenie", but I do have enough brain cells to realize that electricity costs money. If you computer is on it is using power.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Being a couple on my desk, and a few in a remote rack, so that when I get to the office tomorrow morning the results of the carefully prepared Sunday midnight run will be available for me to debug. It takes several hours to prepare this experiment, and there wasn't time to run it on Friday night before I went home, and I didn't want to risk the logs cycling far enough to destroy the evidence. (Yes I can fiddle with the log settings, but the more things I fiddle with the further my experient is from what happens in the field and the less likely I am to catch some real behaviour.)
But usually I switch things off, I'm not one of these willy-waving "my OS stays up longer than yours" plonkers.
Almost any mac with "soft" power has had the capability to do timer-based power-on (and power-off, which is cancelled if you have any unsaved work or an application otherwise won't quit on its own.)
Also, waking up from sleep mode is virtually instantaneous on most Macs. Just watch for mounted filesystems to netatalk servers. "Real" AFP servers handle clients sleeping and reconnecting, netatalk never has. Also, occasionally a machine won't fully wake up, particularly if you use the "require password to wake" feature; try sleeping the machine and waking it again (only works on portables, of course.)
Please help metamoderate.
Someone might be using it ... there are always a few late users. Trying to determine if a computer is in use in order to shut it down isn't always that simple.
... it won't be a 100% solution, but most people would probably comply, so for the comparatively little effort put in I bet you can hardly get a better return.
I suggest a simpler, low-tech solution - just stick up visible signs in the labs, and on some of the major office floors, asking people to shut down the computers in the evenings
Just the energy savings on that many computers would be not insignificant.
That'd cut into my [InsertList]
[InsertList]
1: Distributed.net
2: Folding@Home
3: SETI@Home
4: Gaming
5: PR0N.
[/InsertList]
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Our network has project data distributed all over various workstations, and we have people on various projects at work very late or logging in from home to check on things. Ican't turn off my workstation because my supervisor's remote login session runs on it, and he does stuff at home after his kids go to sleep. I can't turn off my workstation because there's project data stored there that may be needed or updated "after hours", as well as for long computer jobs that can't be suspended and restarted partway through, and part of these longrunning jobs is to do them overnight so they're complete in the morning, or complete in 3 days instead of 9 days with the workers doing nothing while they wait those longer times. Not all situations even allow turning things off to be very practical.
Microsoft seems to have figured it out. They shut down my computer for me quite often to do updates.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Most PCs now leave the NIC powered up all the time.
We power down every night. The Dell desktops we use all come with wake-up functionality built into the BIOS. Wake-on LAN is another option. The BIOS is set to boot up all computers at 8:00, with automatic updates set for 8:10. Everyone else gets in around 8:20 (office opens at 8:30). The printers all hibernate automatically. During the day they go into low-power mode after about 30 minutes of activity, after 6 p.m., they do so after about 5 minutes. I turn off lights before leaving, too (I'm the first one in and last one out most days).
Backups and system updates happen at night, a requirement of (state governmental) department policy. Folks who do shut down at night to save power (the argument isn't valid, since it's bought wholesale and in bulk in advance)... well, I can't say what they do to them.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I service 10 to 15 small businesses each with 10-30 computers. When I have my meeting with them I suggest ways to save them money. One of them is powering off computers at night, and using the builtin power save features. Most users are annoyed with the 20 minute default so I compromise. I set it to 90. This is so when an employee returns from lunch their computer is still running and they are none the wiser and have no reason to panic. If they forget to turn it off at night, the screen and hdd spin down at 90 minutes and the computer goes to standby 30 minutes later. I have experimented with hibernation, but found that every once in a while a computer will go in to a coma, so for now I don't implement it.
For computers that have no specific user (shared) I schedule a task to run at 7pm shutdown.exe -f -s -t 900 -c "Nightly shutdown has begun. blah blah blah"
Then have the server send a magic packet to them in the morning right before people begin to show up.
I have not had a single complaint.
In desert climates such as AZ there are more benefits than just saving power. These mid and mini tower computers turn into hightech digital air filters and ingest a lot of dust. Having them go into standby or power off lessens the dust storm when doing quarterly maintenance with the air compressor.
One would think that checking the door badge access logs would be simpler... but in reality they are going to be looking at who (not upper management mind you) is paid the most.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?
Yes and no.
When I first got comfortable in my current job, I made a big push toward "greening" our IT resources. As one obvious (erroneously, as I'll explain in a sec) step in this, I convinced most of my users to shut down at night. If we need to push out updates, WOL works just fine for turning machines on a couple hours before the start of the day, and it doesn't impact anyone during working hours.
Then I learned how electric billing actually works for commercial users - Put simply, your company doesn't care if machines stay on all night, because they pay based on their peak load, which will always occur during normal business hours. I had applied ideas that make perfect sense at home, to an environment where they don't apply.
Now, that doesn't mean we should just leave machines on 24/7 - Using electricity has an an environmental aspect in addition to the monetary cost. But if it inconveniences users by more than a few seconds every day, any conservation efforts will actually cost the company money in the long run.
So, I still encourage my users to shut down, and 95% comply. But if they consider it too much of a hassle, I can't financially justify forcing them to spend the first minute of the work day waiting for their machine to boot (not that anyone really works for the first five to ten minutes of the day, between coffee, hitting the bathroom, and just getting the obligatory morning socializing out of the way).
As for the security aspect of this, the servers must run 24/7, and any attacker would target them rather than some random user's desktop. I don't worry about an attacker using a compromised desktop as an intermediate step to the servers, because the desktops have no more privileges on them than anything else inside the firewall (and even then, not much more than a totally untrusted source, except for nonconfidential shared resources that we could restore in a matter of minutes if necessary).
I'm glad the original poster mentioned that this green thing is a fad. It's always amusing when I hear all these SUV-driving, Mac-using hipsters talk about how "green" they are.
Waiting for the system to boot, plus whatever manual post boot action the user takes, is not productive use of the employee time. For a full shutdown, I suspect the cost of this "employee downtime" far outweigh any power saving.
For hibernate or sleep, the situation might be better.
How will you account for lost productivity for power users? Leaving your desktop set up ready to go in the morning while system just turns off the monitor and spins down cpu/hdd is a great way to save about an hour each day. (+ shutdown/bootup times...)
Most electrical equipment failures are not due to running_time but power_off_on_cycles. Are you sure prolonging equipment life is a valid excuse for you?
Now, secretaries that have no idea how to use their pcs are a problem, but what about power users, what about research crunching their numbers overnights?
This would be more of an option if I could turn the work computer back on remotely if needed. I think there are servers that have that feature. 95% of the time I don't need to access my work computer from home outside of business hours, but it gets left on for the that other 5%.
Loose lips lose spit.
When do you patch? Our users don't want long startups or shutdowns and won't stand for mid-day patches. At night is it.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
The large majority of computers at the European Commission (a BIG number of networked computers) are shut down atomatically at a given Hour, 8pm I think. All power sockets stop providing power past a certain hour also.
Of course there are "exception lists" and some a small number of power sockets that provide power all night (they're re, so you easy to spot but only available in certain parts of the EC).
at my old workplace we had an auto-shutdown policy, 30 mins after normal hours. A simple popup came up with a 5 min timeout, and there was a "Don't shut down for the next 24 hrs" shortcut on the desktop if you had a long-lasting job running. There was wake-on-lan for updates and 10 mins before hours. Worked like a charm..
What?
To be honest, the reason why I don't turn my own PC off at night is because it takes so much time to bootup and then load all of my applications that to turn it off each night would require me to turn up to work earlier the next day just to get everything running.
required: All computers/monitors powered down. (and locked back when computers had locks) All documents stored and locked. But because a rule is only as good as its enforcement: Hall monitors would come around after dark on random inspections.
Computers don't use a whole lot when they idle. Unless you are loading them up with lots of drives and a big GPU, you'll probably find they draw in the realm of 50 watts just idling. Ok so looking at my power bill I get about $0.06 per kilowatt hour of energy. At 50 watts of draw it takes 20 hours for a computer to use a kWh. Running the numbers I come up with about $100,000. So assuming the costs quoted by the grand parent are correct, one patch time would just about pay the power bill the whole year and two would go over it.
For better or worse, electricity isn't very expensive so it really isn't an area for huge cost savings. Also normal office computers really just don't draw much power when idle. They often don't draw that much even in operation. Enthusiasts get a little over excited with power supply sizes, but it's fairly rare to find the computer that actually needs a large PSU. You discover that even a system decked out with an 8800 and a bunch of harddrives would probably work just fine with a 400 watt PSU.
The good news is that Intel is working on something that may be a solution to this. Intel AMT should allow for systems to be remotely managed, including when they are powered off (computers don't go all the way off, they are still drawing a little bit). So you should be able to have them power up, do what they need to do, then power back down.
Among other projects, I worked on the power supply controls for the Cray Super Dragon. No, you probably never heard of it, but it became the Sun ES-10K.
This box had variable voltage power supples which required me to adjust them from cold start. I had to calibrate A/D, take samples, tweak, etc all through JTAG and cumulatively it was quite slow. Like over an hour.
My manager was not impressed, I shrugged and said "who turns these off?" - and the marketing droid/product manager said "they do in Japan". Fine. The hardware people were nice enough to give me multiple JTAG lines and power up time shrank to acceptable limits.
Turn off? If you buy that class of computer, you always have background jobs running to use the spare cycles, otherwise you're wasting money.
I can't help but laugh at those that quote reasons such as 'automatic updates' and 'antivirus scans' as legitimate reasons for leaving a computer on overnight.
With many enterprise management tools, such as Zenworks, it's quite simple to schedule a wake-on-lan task to wake computers up at say, 6am, to perform their daily tasks. It can even be configured to push out an automatic reimage of the machine. Once the updates and scans are done by 7am, people are just beginning to come into the office, yet you've still had a whole 10 hours of downtime. Incidentally, I've not seen a single computer in the past 4 years that doesn't support WoL on the mainboard NIC. Big bucks enterprise manglement apps aren't even required. A simple cron job, and some wakelan/ether-wake/wakeonlan/Net::Wake magic will do it for free. Just gather a list of Mac addresses with ettercap or your friendly ARP table or asset management app/spreadsheet.
May will say that the bandwidth requirements of updates squeezed into the 6am to 7am slot will degrade systems, but that's where a background process such as BITS should be used (as demonstrated by Eve Online, Zenworks, Microsoft and Google). The virus updates are a minor bandwidth requirement if you have suitable leaf services, and the actual scan is only locally intensive.
Being a public sector organisation, we're working towards a greener profile (due to govt policies), and all the tools are there and working. It just needs some effort on the part of the administrators.
A simple script that prompts the user to keep the computer on, else shuts down automatically at a certain time would do the trick. You could even get more into it and add the ability to detect if they have been idle for so long, so people that just stepped away from the station are saved.
:(){
BITD when I was an IT support type in a Cambridge University college, the library of that college had a small computer room with around half-a-dozen Macs (this was in the OS 8.x days.) These machines seemed particularly flaky, often requiring PRAM resets, restores and the occasional rebuild. It was only after a while that I learned why these machines were so flaky.
Every power outlet in that room was connected to a kill switch on the wall and come 5pm, when the room closed, yep you guessed it - someone hit the kill switch. Irrespective of whether students were using the machines and irrespective of which particular part of the write cycle the HD head was at.
Run --> cmd --> shutdown -i
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
That'll go down very well with everyone who needs to do rendering or long-running video encoding or suchlike. :)
The correct plural of virus is viruses.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
As an individual, if you have to leave your machines on for some reason (to take updates or just because you might need to access it), you can feel less guilty about the wasted energy if you donate your unused cycles to look for a cure for cancer or for aliens (on the assumption the aliens' advanced technology can easily cure cancer anyway). I install a http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ agent on all machines I control (desktop, lab machines, friends' machines when they ask me to fix it for them).
Night is when tape backups run. It is when I sync my home computer to my office computer. And when it is not doing other things, my office computer participates in distributed computing projects to donate time to other scientific word.
The DoD is actually looking into the Wake on LAN solution. The USAF will begin pushing a GPO to put monitors to sleep after 10min and PC's to sleep after 60min of inactivity within the next month (as of now, each user can set their own limits). Their are more efficient time limits, but to accommodate as many users as possible they came up with those average times. The WOL software within windows has some issues, so I believe they are going to go with a 3rd party solution that will wake up the PCs for SMS patch pushes. Unfortunately not all PCs work as they are supposed to so some people will be inconvenienced with the SMS push upon waking their machines, but overall this will save more in power consumption then wasted user time. Esp since most of the time while users wait for their accounts to login they use that time to get their coffee or go through their paper inboxes, etc...
10k workstations
x
100 watts each
equals
1,000 kW
==========
1,000 kW
x
12 hours/day
x
261 days
equals
3,132 kWh per year
===================
3,132 kWh
x
0.08 $/kWh
equals
250,000+/- $/year
The above assumes that the computers run at 100W while idle, but they probably use closer to 25 watts while idle. In addition you should be able to sleep them or hibernate them and save more.
The above also assumes that the incremental cost of electricity is 8 cents per kWh (In the Chicago area, which has high rates, it's probably around 5 or 6 cents per kWh). You may have an overall higher cost when you include fees for metering and service, etc., but you are already paying that just for your daytime use. You probably have lower hourly costs than I guessed, especially as most commercial rates can give you a break for usage in off-peak hours.
My guess is that you'll be spending less than $10,000 per month to keep those PCs on overnight, or 1$ per workstation per month.
If you have 10,000 workstations, you're probably spending 6 figures a month on your electricity bill already.
So for a relatively minor cost, you can leave your machines on overnight to push updates, virus scan, etc.
Still, it's better for the environment to be able to turn off as much as possible. Though with today's weather, the extra heat would be welcome and would not cost anything if you have electric heat.
YMMV, heating, A/C, etc. may affect results.
just replying to myself to correct a number:
1,000 kW
x
12 hours/day
x
261 days
equals
>> 3,132,000 kWh per year > 3,132,000 kWh
x
0.08 $/kWh
equals
250,000+/- $/year
The old wisdom was that it took more energy, and caused more wear and tear on the drive's mechanics, to power down and then spin up a hard drive. I suspect there was some merit to this 'way back when, and people were encouraged to leave their desktop computers running. However, on the really old Novell networks, people had to be encouraged to log out at night--or else there would be problems backing-up their network directories. Running around enforcing/explaining was a real time waster for network administrators. I suspect that the whole "leave it on" thing is nothing but a mindless continuation of those antiquated policies; certainly they're no longer relevant. When I left IT to start up my own business, I continued to leave my system running all the time. What has finally cured me has been my new Mac, which has a wireless keyboard and mouse. Fiddling with and replacing the batteries once a month, remembering to put them on the charger, or using up a few expensive AA's when I forget, is a lot more trouble than shutting everything down at night.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I finished a contract position late last year with a largish financial company. I started the new year with a permanent position at a telecommunications company. Both seem to be phasing out desktops in favour of laptops. Are desktops relevant any more? At my current employer, I know no one with a desktop (not even the admin assistants). Laptops consume less power while running and generally get turned off at the end of the day. If you want to save power, they would seem to be the way to go.
linquendum tondere
The problem with that is that "a computer being in use" and "having a user behind the computer" often don't correlate, so you DO need an easy way to be able to leave computers on whenever necessary. Even in a small organisation it is frequently the case that they do not. (For example, right now I'm busy running a huge Subversion database dump that will run well into the night.) There are many other such situations, e.g. large software, running conversions on large sets of data, research apps that require lots of calculations, large copies or downloads, etc.
Hibernate is simply "off", there is zero power consumption.
This is all configurable, you could have your PC behave in the same way. I have heard anecdotal evidence that Macs are a bit better at this; XP is quite good but my own XP laptop can still sometimes fail to come back from either standby or hibernate. As Apple is in control of the hardware you might expect better performance in this area.
Cant be as bad as Rite Aid, they require the management at the store to leave the computers, terminals AND EVERY light on even when the store is closed and empty.
They say its to help deter someone from breaking into the store and trying to steal stuff.....which im sure if you did the numbers would actually cost the company more to leave everything on, than to have a theft every once in a while....
Do lights really stop break-ins?
"an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind"
My clients power down all their Macs. They're set to sleep after a fixed interval, which uses hardly any power - and they can all wake for remote access when needed. Easy!
Legions of corporate monitors display the default "Flying Windows Logo" screen saver day and night, rather than putting monitors in sleep mode. This wastes a constant stream of juice.
One monitor will use $35 a year of electricity after-hours and on weekends. That's not including the extra heat load on building HVAC.
In a company with 1000 computers, IT could save $35k a year just by changing the default setting on desktop installs. (assumed: 50 W, $0.11/kWh)
A company I used to work for almost 10 years ago did this. They had two kinds of power outlets in every room. White ones were for desk lamps and regular PCs while orange ones were for important equipment (the occasional PC that must be on 24/7).
The white ones were powered down every evening at some time. Yepp, that means hard shutdown for any connected PCs. No, people staying late wasn't a problem - it was a 9-to-5 company where the few people who occasionally did stay late had their machines connected to the orange outlets.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Why not just have the machine shut down automatically on logout if it's between two specified times (eg. 9pm and 8am)?
Nobody else has this sig.
Unfortunately the EPA's EZ GPO page seems to have gone poof or something recently, but you can get it here.
Basically, you push a (simple) msi to the machines (I do this a lot of the time via psexec (props to Mark Russinovich) but there are other methods. Once you have that running on the machine you can configure how you want your machines to behave/re power management:
We also have a script that runs at midnight a few days of the month that does the magic packet thing as has been mentioned so WSUS and/or SMS (or SC:CM) can do their thing and automatic updates run as normal. In a few "why does my machine have to boot up every day this sucks" user groups we have a scheduled job to send magic packets about 15 minutes before they arrive to wake up their machines. With hybernate they hardly know anything happened.
We are starting to incorporate SMS to the desktop (approx 100,000) and the intent is to have it happen at night. This means the machines need to be on. We may look at doing wake on lan in the future but there are requirements that need to be met to do that and until then, turning off computers won't be mandated anymore. Of course the advertisements will trigger when the user turns on their workstations but we would like to have most computers updated by the time the user shows up in the morning while minimizing impact on the network when most users are online.
if(later than 8 pm && idle for half an hour)
shut down or hibernate
It's hard to imagine this issue important enough to anyone in IT that they are ready to seriously consider acting on it. If, having solved all more important issues, you are ready to tackle this one, then congratulations, sir, you win, and are pretty much no longer needed in your job, and are ready for replacement by someone inferior.
I have a nice "power down" script that runs every evening. First, it does a subversion update, then it defrags my harddisk, and finally it makes my machine go to sleep. Oh, and once in a week it updates spybot S&D. If only microsoft were so smart to do updating just before power down instead of just after power up....
The problem I have with hibernate (other than not being able to access the computer from remote without having some wake-on-lan access), is existing TCP connections. Unless both systems go into hibernation and come out at the same time, one is MIA and you can easily loose the connection.
Apart from a larger electricity bill, I dont see any green benefits of powering down at night. The power station does not throttle down at night or according to grid load, so they run all night pumping energy and CO2 out in the air as far as I know. What we should consider instead is how to reduce electricity use in general and during peak hours, in addition to investigate other ways to mitigate the peak load, vehicle to grid is one idea. Our electricity grid is dimensioned, maintained and funded for those rear peak occurrences when we use a lot more electricity than normal.
Also I don't think signs will have anywhere near the impact you imagine. We can't even get users to not eat around the machines.
Obligatory disclaimer: This is my opinion, and may not reflect that of my employers. If you have a problem with it, take it up with me, not them.
I work for Dell. I can tell you for a fact that we take the environment seriously. The building I work in houses a 24/7 call center, but certain areas of the building are not 24/7. Corporate sales for the country are here, and take up half of the 3rd floor, for example. I happen to be in the sales department myself, and there's a piece of software installed on every desktop that hibernates the computer at 20:30 EST (with a half-hour countdown to that point). My department shuts down at 19:00, no other sales department is open past 20:00. We all open at 08:00 the next day, and the automatic hibernation sets an alarm to wake up the computer at 07:45. Alternately, if you turn your own system off through the start button and shut down, it'll stay off until you turn it back on.
We've also got computer recycling programs in place, and the "plant a tree" initiative where you can have us plant a tree for every computer you buy.
Sure. Some companies don't take going green seriously. But some do. And the number of companies that are taking it seriously is growing. Besides which, every little bit helps. Do you know the amount of energy that could be saved if everybody unplugged those electronic devices that "sleep" when they're not being used? 2W doesn't sound like much, until you multiply it by half a billion devices.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Your BIOS can't log you in, and that's when all that system-tray crap starts happening.
(You do have a password, right? Or a corporate Active Directory login?)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
At the school I work at, we have an automatic shutdown at 6 PM. It has a five minute timer and is preceeded by a text file in a DOS window reminding people that there is an "ABORT SHUTDOWN" option in their start menu if they are using the PC and the shutdown process begins.
/DELETE ALL (or whatever the syntax is) - to prevent the AT table from getting crowded with dozens of the same command
Two simple batch files for XP, on in the All Users startup directory, one in the All Users\Information Services directory of the start menu.
Startup:
AT
AT 18:00 "shutdown -t 600"
Abort:
Shutdown -a
We reset the AT table every day just in case some know-it-all high school student finds out such a thing exists and starts screwing with it. For the most part, though, not even the techs knew such a thing existed until I proposed using it.
We tried a lot of other ideas, but this is the simplest and most user-friendly. Big signs don't work, teachers and lab aids are no better than the students about following directions. Since implementing it 18 months ago, we've gone from having roughly 900 PCs online at night to about 100...including servers, timeclock systems running thinstation terminal sessions, and technology and admin workstations that are excepted from the shutdown policy.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Ever since the "green fad" started we've been asked by our admins to turn off the machines over night. No problems.. you just have to wait a minute or so at the morning for it to boot. There is no enforcement of this, so if you need to run something over night you can do so just fine. As someone said - it may not save real money for the company but it should reduce the 'energy waste'.
Why not set the PC's to power off automagically? You could save yourself a lot of hassles...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Seriously. You need to take a couple of simple electrical courses. Specifically, volts-for-dolts a physics course on magnetism, and a practical, hands-on course working with electric motors. All handily part of an electrical engineering degree. When there is load on an electric generator, it takes more energy to keep it moving. Of course, we need to keep it moving at the same speed (60Hz or 50Hz, depending on which part of the world you're in) at all times, so that means using more coal, gas, whatever, when there is higher demand, and nearly none when there is no demand (not that that ever happens, but I will admit to the fact that you never use no energy even when no energy is being demanded).
In fact, my alma mater pointed out that they had a huge electric motor (approx 20' tall) that did nothing but spin (not doing any actual "work") to lower power demand for the university. When the capacitance of the grid got too high (such that voltage and current were too far out of phase with one another), they'd turn on the motor (basically, an oversized inductor) to correct the phase, lowering the demand on the external grid, resulting in a real cost savings to the university on their huge electrical bills.
The CO2 output of your carbon-based generators will be drastically lower at night than during the day. It's really that simple. I'm no greenie, but this is simple fact, and completely non-controversial. Just go ask your local power utility.
Just give them laptops and they will hibernate the computer every night in order to hide it from potential thieves, or to use it at home, ect.
Why not schedule a custom program at shutdown that has a cancel button for a minute but afterwards runs a full virusscan and backup if this was more then a week ago. Afterwards the shut down continues and the PC is off. If you just need to restart you can cancel the scan but otherwise all PC's run a virusscan and backup once a week and otherwise the PC's are off.
If the users have no inconvenience from shutting down there PC then you just need to educate the users.
My freeware games
because how would i get to show off my uptime. My computer hasn't been powered off in X years and so on. This whole "green" movement is just windows users trying to beat my uptime. I will never be fooled by you bwaa haa haaaa
If you issue laptops to everyone (instead of desktops) the users won't have much choice about powering down at night.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I know in particle physics we need to leave our computers on overnight quite regularly. We share computing resources and often run simulations for several days (or longer). Shutting down the routers and switches connecting one computer to the rest of the particle computers in the building effectively cancels the simulation since huge datasets might be spread across 7 or 8 computers. At CERN, when the LHC turns on there will be thousands of computers running 24 hours a day for many years. At a university, obtaining your sample set of data may require at least a day (you're expected to pull the data and then work with it rather than using CERN computing resources, although the specifics haven't been worked out yet). Some projects just require that much time and energy. Most days you should be able to shut off large portions of the network, though.
I'm certain there are other sciences that have similar concerns. I think the best way is to send out a friendly e-mail reminding people to turn off their computers when they leave. That should get at least a handful of computers off for the night. Depending on how successful or unsuccessful that strategy is, shutting off computers that are definitely unnecessary (public access terminals for example) would be a fine idea.
What happens if they are away to a snack machine, have gone outside to make/accept a mobile phone call, or talking to a professor or someone else?
Surely, the system could be smart enough not to shut itself down if someone is already logged in?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Seems to me there are a few ways to help with power savings. Many small businesses do not think about the power they are using as often they don't think it is that big of a factor. Every little bit helps, IMHO.
-During equipment upgrades, buy more energy efficient models, like HP's new desktops with the 80 PLUS power supply. Select dc5700 business desktops have an enhanced power supply to save power while on, and I think save even more while sleeping. I'm sure other brands have or will come out with similar units. Replace CRT monitors with LCD as well.
-Use those power management features. The monitor (less so now with LCD) and hard drive are big power drains--set them to power down after 30 minutes or so. Turn off those GL screen savers as well so they don't crank up the system when they come on. Overnight patching can still occur.
-Don't forget your server power as well. Virtualize and consolidate servers to reduce the computer of physical computers you have. Dump that old PIII box that's "still running" for (dare I suggest) even a new Celeron if funds are tight.
-Use colocation hosting, if possible. Often large ISP's have more efficient UPS and cooling systems saving some resources in the grand scheme of things. You may be able to double-up on a server with another customer, too.
-Utilize thin clients wherever possible. No hard drives and minimal other parts mean less power usage.
-Patching only on certain nights. Only over the weekend or just during weekday nights. Instruct users to turn off computers on the non-patch nights.
-Deploy more laptops. Laptops require less power then desktop machines. This creates a different maintenance headache, however.
Hope some of these weren't mentioned already, but might help someone out there...
-m
http://www.invisik.com
If I'm not mistaken... the shutdown command can shutdown remote computers in the same workgroup. Do you have anything in place to prevent that (since ur tech people did not know this even existed)? I would imagine all it would take is for one student to realise he can shut down the whole lab with one command to wreak some havoc.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
Tne one reason I don't hibernate my work machine is that occasionally, I may have to
remote desktop to it from home. If I hibernate the work m/c & I had to Remote Desktop
from home for something urgent, is there any way to do it?
Does anyone know quantitatively how much power it takes to manufacture a hard drive and if it equals or is greater than the power that would be saved by shutting down machines at night? It's long been argued that hard drives last much longer if the machine runs continuously.
When I was still a full-time SA, all of our laptops would at least go to sleep when not used for a given period, and after an hour, would power down.
requires that ALL computers on the network never be powered down. They push updates out overnight and perform other sinister acts with the systems while there are no users on them. This is in the neighborhood of about 35000+ systems. There has to be a considerable amount of power consumption there. These machines generally run 24/7/365.
Homo homini lupus
We actually tell our 1500+ employees to leave all their desktops on every night because we do backups of every single computer every single night. We actually chide our users if we find out their machine hasn't been backing up because it wasn't left on.
"and technology and admin workstations that are excepted from the shutdown policy."
Shutdown everybody except yourself. Great attitude.
Too bad for them. People leave themselves logged in all the time at the end of the day. Too many people are sloppy for us to make allowances for things like that.
It should be noted that this is a public K-12 school, not a university. There aren't many people around at 6:00 outside of administration personnel. Those who are have been warned what will happen; if they get up at 5:58 to do whatever and come back seven minutes later to their PC shut down, they'd better have saved their work.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
My company, which is global w/ 1,000's of pc's shuts them all down (except for servers, etc.) every night at 8pm local time. We use a utility called Night Watchman which runs as a service and shuts them down. For those who are still in the office, you can postpone the shutdownfor an hour at a time by clicking a button on a dialogue box. This was installed to reduce energy costs mainly. It works well.
I work in a fairly small company with approximately 35 workstations, and besides that about 100 PCs to do other work on (I'm working in a software/games testing lab). Every night the last person that leaves the building also checks if all PCs and monitors are out, closes all windows, turns off all lights etc. Not for being "green", but just to reduce the unnecessary costs. Seems it saves us quite a big buck every year.
Whats the trade off between hard drive wear and power savings? We have a nightly log-off job that I would like to turn into a nightly shut-down job and then use WoL whenever nightly updates are needed. Does anyone have stats to back up the theory that added power on and power off cycles will decrease the hard drive's lifespan? With the standard business lease being 3 years and what seems like an already high frequency of Dell HD failures at my current office, should I really be worried about this increased wear on the hard drives?
What if they're a software engineer running a 10-hour script to test before running it at a client's? And therefore, obviously not present.
Code. Writing. Writing Code. Writing in general. What? They aren't -that- differnet.
We use to tell our users to NOT turn off their computers nightly. Dont know if it still holds true with modern computers but with older systems just the shock of turning off and on the computer nightly could wear out the power button contacts or cause premature failure of the system... Out of habbit we still recommend only powering down on weekends.
The only people who have desktop computers are either doing specialized work like labs
or else they're people whose job requires working in one place like clerks.
So the servers are going all the time, and there'd be no good way to shut most of them down without inconveniencing a lot of people. On the other hand, servers are a lot more productive, and most of the power waste happens when people's laptops are burning power unnecessarily (e.g. Mozilla's flailing away at some escaped Javascript.)
Some people use monitors at their desks, and those all have the energy-star shutoff features. And the copy machines power down after a while of non-use, but that's not something that affects many people, and if you're the first one to hit the copy machine, you can go get coffee while it warms up.
It's bad enough that users have to wait for their laptops to power up.
Some years, sleep mode works most of the time, and some years it doesn't, depending on what hardware we have, what OS version, and what broken settings the corporate IT department has set this time. My laptop has an unchangeable 10-minute screen locker on it - fine if I'm in the office, really annoying at home, and I can't even change to a different screen saver.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Logging in takes about 15 minutes with several different systems having the need to be launched. Also we have a policy that ready for work is when your PC is up and running and ready for work.
That means those 15 minutes are my personal time. So no way I am going to do the startup then.
I am sure that if they were paying the 15 minutes for each and everybody, they will be looking for solutions extremely fast. And hybernate does not work. Neither does the screensaver that could already turn off the monitor.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
IIRC, the "shutdown" command DOES adhere to whatever secutity settings have been laid down in the Local Security Policy (or Group Policies for the larger organisations out there). One of the settings for the local machine that is amongst the configurables here is who can shut the machine down locally, and who can shut it down remotely. The two lists are separate and by default EVERYONE can shut down the machine if logged in locally, but to shut down a machine across the network you'd either need to be explicitly added to the ACL or would need to be in the Domain Admins group (where the machine is a member of a domain).
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
We never power down our network of PCs and laptops, although our ten-worker office force doesn't warrant much of a mention on the power grid. The city is handing out vouchers for free, brand-new refrigerators that are given to so-called needy individuals. If the city of Los Angeles, in the midst of a self-proclaimed fiscal crisis, can afford to give away brand-new refrigerators to people without asking for proof of citizenship or financial eligibility, then we're not powering down our computer networks at night to curb the onslaught of global warming, which is bullshit anyways.
admin as in administration, not network admin (who falls under technology).
But yeah, we shut down everyone except ourselves and the administrative offices because we're the ones who frequently have to drop what we're doing quickly and might forget to save an open document. We're also the ones most likely to work odd hours.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
They really should get their own computer instead of sneaking into a public school. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble that can get you into these days?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I believe that would require local admin privileges, which they don't have.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
We're a 3PL and I handle IT for two accounts within the warehouse I work in. These two accounts have several terminals that are shutdown every night at 20:00 EST. We have a PHP driven intranet site that allows one to skip shutdown for the night so long as you schedule it. We usually keep one outbound shipping line open for anyone wanting to run a second or third shift, so at most the server and three or four terminals are on all night. Nothing is on Saturday or Sunday, unless someone calls me and asks to turn something on for them, or they turn on the clients themselves and I leave the server on for them for the weekend. Our server is simply the transaction server that provides the backend for our clients. Our orders, website, and other stuff that need to be always on is handled in some off-site data center.
The power station does not throttle down at night or according to grid load, so they run all night pumping energy and CO2 out in the air as far as I know.
Well then as the old adage goes, shows what you know.
These days most network cards can auto-respond even if the computer is sleeping. So just because you can ping does not mean the computer is on.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The last desktop computer that I can remember running perpetually was a VAXstation running VMS. Those things could run for as long as the mainframes they were clustered with. Then we migrated to high-end PCs around 1994 (running Windows for Workgroups!) to replace the VAXstations. Developers were incredulous that they had to shutdown their computers at night because they weren't stable enough to be left running 24x7. Dr. Watson was a frequent visitor back in those days. Granted, the boot time of VAXstations was nearly 40 minutes, so they HAD to stay up. Even so, I don't remember ANY version of Windows that can remain stable over an extended period of time in a desktop environment. Then again, I stopped looking after Windows 2000.
With modern power management, desktop machines really WANT to hibernate, spin down the disk drive, or at least turn off their ethernet cards. And with that comes the confusion of apps that think they have files open when the file server thinks otherwise, sessions that appear open but are not, etc. I just tell everyone "Do a full shutdown at night, with a fresh start in the morning. It makes things easier on you and the helpdesk. And since the first response out of the help desk is always 'Reboot', you might as well take care of that first thing in the morning while you pour a cup of coffee."
Yeah. In a corporate environment, this sort of decision would get an IT person fired.
>They aren't -that- differnet.
You mispelled "different".
HTH. HAND.
Finished their cycle and were 100% Mac when I left including the front office. When machines were not in use, they automatically loaded and processed jobs from the render queue either for Screamernet (lightwave), QMaster (Shake/FCP), or Xgrid (A number of other applications, including later versions of Shake and Terragen). In our case, it was a matter of the more CPU cycles the better.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I work for a medium size European bank. Total workstations aprx. 22000 in 13 different countries.
We used to leave all our PCs on all the time in order to run updates, patches etc.
In my area of operations there are only about 3300 PCs. Nine months ago we implemented a policy where all users were required to turn off their PCs (not servers) at the end of day. Wake-on-LAN was used to turn the PCs on during the night for updates and 15 minutes before the start of the workday.
Very conservatively, we estimate that we will save about EUR153000 (USD225000) every year (I live in a country with very high electricity rates).
So, it is definitely worth it financially, our users were not adversely affected at all and it helped morale by making the workplace a greener place.
At my university http://www.polito.it/ are beta-testing a system that - automatically turns off the PC at a given time - automatically turns it on using WOL features at a given time - allows user to turn on/off their PC using a web page. - allows IT to manage on/off time in case patches or updates must be deployed Once finished, we plan to release it as GPL.
While automatic updates are a good reason to leave machines on, they are also a good reason to leave machines off. At my last company (about 1-1.5 years ago) we got hit with a bad update to the AV software over a weekend. Any machine that was on did the update, re-scanned and trashed a bunch of files belonging to things like MS Office. Those machines (like mine) that weren't on over the weekend did not because the update got fixed before Monday morning.
Those of us who were shutdown over the weekend had to wait a few minutes (like always) for updates, but the machines that were on were hosed for half the day.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
We have around 35 Sun servers all with ALOM ( http://www.sun.com/servers/alom.html ) - all of them used to be always on 24x7. I wrote a simple python script using the telnetlib module that runs on a backup server which is required to be on all times. The script runs as a cron job, connects to the ALOM on each one of the 35 servers at night and shuts them down. It brings then back up early in the morning.
Few people complained that they needed their server to be up at some nights or weekends - I worked around that by giving them a folder to scp a file with server name as the file name and the script just skips shutting down those servers which have files of their hostname in the SCP folder for that day. Worked well so far. People from other divisions even started using the scripts for their servers.
so, driving uphill uses the same amount of gasoline that driving downhill?
the power station does throttle down at night. they keep the generator at the same speed (3600RPM I guess, to give you 60Hz). but they don't need the same amount of fuel to keep it going. the usage on the grid acts like a brake on the generator, in the same way that the road conditions affect your bicycle.
if it's steam-based (gas, coal, nuclear), you need more steam to keep a higher pressure, to keep the generator rotating at the same speed, and that means heating more water, and more water needs more energy, and more energy needs more fuel. hydroelectric plants shut down unused turbines.
It's amazing how people can have such strong feelings about an issue and have them be based on such utter nonsense.
Have you ever jump-started a car? Did you not notice how when you connect jumper cables to the vehicle with the dead battery, the running car has its engine get slogged down by the extra load? And does it not stand to reason that if you want to hold the engine at the same RPM (as an electric utility has to do to hold line frequency) you have to feed the engine more gas to do so?
If you draw more power out of a circuit, somewhere, more power has to be put in.
Peak load is why extra power plants need to be built. Sure, it is great to decrease that to prevent the extra emissions. But the loads at all times of the day and night should be reduced as well where possible.
We use Sun Rays. When there is no card in there, the unit puts the monitor into standby after 10 minutes or so. The Sun Ray itself has a 100 MHz RISC processor and not much else, so power consumption is tiny. Powering up in the morning is as simple as inserting the card and entering your password and you're right where you left off.
There are other thin-client solutions out there to which most of these advantages would apply. I know it is a tired old topic, but is anyone else surprised that "thin" is the exception and not the norm?
When do you your updates, backups and large software pushes to distribution points? In the middle of the day so it hoses your network and gets in the way of the users?
No, its done at night. Shutting down at night isn't overly practical unless you are a SMB with 20 users.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Here's a dumb question: what if you had a multi-processor setup -- it would be slick of an OS could disable power to all but one of the processors and set that one in a slow idle. I mean explicitly turn off the power to the chips. Then if demandticks up, the additional resources could be brought up on the fly. And perhaps easier to implement: what if you could turn off cores and turn down the amt of running cache dynamically?
We use a product called Veridium Surveyor to shut down nearly 2000 Windows desktops. It has flexible policies as to what times of day a machine is allowed to shutdown and how much if any inactivirty is required. It will also generate reports, which may be needed to show the cost savings. Another company called Faronics has a package as well that works similarly, and I believe it supports both Windows and Macs.
In a corporate environment, that sort of decision is made at a corporate policy level, and not at an IT personnel level. Nobody would get fired.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You're focussed on yourself, I bet if you went out and asked the users you'd get a lot of replies around "yeah, the stupid thing tries to shut itself off just when you don't want it to".
Live by your own rules.
Good thing none of us made the decision. Our director doesn't set the technology policies, he recommends them to the superintendent, who then approves/denies/modifies them.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
We do ask the users. We also work in the schools we support. We know that by 5 PM when we go home the parking lots are vacant, or nearly so. The few teachers who do regularly stay after are aware of the policy and don't complain at all.
;)
But hey, you keep right on thinking we live in an ivory tower full of servers. I'd hate to burst that lovely bubble you've built up
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Live by your own rules?
Why?
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
We have been told by our IT department to leave the CPU's powered up and just turn off the monitors. I'm guessing they do updates at night and such. I have always thought it was a waste of electricity...
"My Health Sciences Campus has about 8,000 desktop computers, and on any given night about half of them are left on."
Since you mention that this is a health sciences campus, one of my question is whether the network is shared by the hospital and it's departments, because if that is the case, then it might not be that simple. If the hospital is 'wired' enough in terms of electronic medical records, etc., then having various workstations powered off may not make too much sense. The cost of having clinicians wait for a workstation to become 'available' may in fact be greater than that of leaving these on. Hospitals (at least academic medical centers) are not your typical 'companies' in the sense that things never stop happening there on nights and weekends. So some of the suggestions regarding shutting down network switches, or enforcing workstation policies may not be applicable at all.
Very good idea. One possible problem: if the shutdown is canceled once, the computer will not shut down the next day either if the user remains logged in. You can use the /every flag to have the job automatically repeat itself. If you remote ran that as network admin, and if you have your security set up properly, nobody else will be able to delete that AT job. But they can still abort the individual shutdown if they need to.
Windows:
/every:m,t,w,th,f shutdown -t 0
/etc/crontab
at 20:00
*nix, in
00 20 * * * root shutdown -h now
With that said, it's obvious but it needs to be pointed out anyhow: if a machine needs to run tasks overnight or if it needs to be externally accessible, shutting the machine down is not an option. You MAY be able to use WOL for some services, but YMMV, batteries not included, etc.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
In the company I currently work for, every PC is powered down at night, with only a few exceptions. There are obviously servers still running, but they are actually doing something (backups for instance), and there's sometimes a few machines involved in over-night test procedures. Frankly there is no valid reason for keeping a PC running if it isn't being used. Same goes for the home PC, btw. Switch it off at night.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
If you add up all the salaries of the people who have to wait 10 minutes for their computer to be ready in the morning, you will quickly find that it is far more cost-effective to leave all the computers on 24/7. Anyone who *really* cares about improving energy efficiency will not whine and nag people to turn off their computers; they will instead work on improving boot times and/or making sure that hibernation support is turned on and works properly with all hardware. Of course, whining and nagging is a lot easier.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Yes, I switch the computers off, due to the "green fad", the "saving-money fad", the "they-make-the-air-hot-and-stuffy fad", the "the-unnecessary-whirring-sound-is-annoying fad", the "malware fad", the "Windows-often-works-better-after-a-reboot-anyway fad" and a few more "fads".
Of course, I'm lampooning you by using the word "fad" to mean "reason which I wish to deny", which is the only way that your sentence can make sense. Why do all those extra examples sound strange though? Because few people would systematically want to deny the possibility of saving money by turning machines off, but many a wanker like yourself wishes to deny the science on energy issues.
Run folding@home or something instead of shutting them down. Turn it into a societal asset.
This is a bit off topic, but...
The author says that he knows that about half the machines on campus stay on at night because he tracks the MAC addresses.
In order for this to be true, the entire network must be one giant collision domain. MAC addresses are only "trackable", that is, they are only preserved in the packets within a particular collision domain.
When a packet reaches a switch or router, the source MAC address in the packet is replaced with the outgoing port on that switch/router.
So for this guy to be telling the truth, his network must consist of nothing but hubs. With 8,000 machines, that would be a pretty crappy way to do things.
My computer (a laptop) is on 24/7 and I would never want to be bothered with waiting for it to come back on. It takes about a minute, but I don't want to spend it. I do not pay the bill really either at home or at college, but my computer is never doing nothing. I always have torrents seeding and downloading, other downloads, things to encode, all kinds of things. Sometimes, I recompile big packages in Gentoo (definitely an overnight procedure). It's incredibly useful to have it on all the time.
The only times this computer goes off is for a few ms when it's rebooting to go into Windows or just rebooting (not very often). Often this computer is in either Windows or Linux for days before another reboot.
However, I do hate when computers are on and are not doing anything at all. My room mate would leave his laptop on all the time doing NOTHING other than being connected to AIM. I guess if he wants to receive messages while he's gone (a modern answering machine). But to me it's entirely useless. I hardly ever receive messages while away (yes I may not be equally social as my room mate, other than IRC all the time).
I guess if I had NOTHING to do with computers then I would not have mine on much, but I do A LOT.
Didn't IBM have some UPSes that did the same thing, where instead of using batteries, they used a massive spinning cylinder connected to a motor/generator. Normally, the cylinder would get juice to keep it spinning, but when power went out, the rotational momentum would be sucked off, and would be able to power a room full of mainframes long enough to do an orderly shutdown.
If the host goes offline, then the connection is de facto closed anyway. I'd think saving the connection would be the rare exception rather than the rule.
I have scheduled tasks that run every day, other people leave spreadsheets and programs open (I myself have 20 - 30 things open most of the time). I don't want to spend the time to reopen all my crap, and I don't want to take the risk of hibernation not working properly.
;)
At home, I leave my machine on all the time too, because I torrent
If I were a taxpayer in your district, I would appreciate the savings on the school's electric bill.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
When everyone comes to work at 830am and powers up will your DHCP servers rollover and die?
I need to remote in (VPN/Remote Desktop) to my machine at the office from time to time from home or whilst mobile. If my IT folks set a domain policy (if they *can* do that - I'm pretty sure they could if they wanted to) to shut off on weekends or at night, it would NOT go over well. I do some of my best work in "off-hours".
/.
Actual "Work time" is for reading
My dual G5 is constantly running at full processor saturation. Monitor goes to sleep and I bet the hard drive rarely spins, but the processors are always doing some computation. Also, I need to ssh into my machine almost nightly to get a file or to check how a computation is moving along. I hate to see a mandatory policy to shut me down nightly.
I'm sick of this pressure campaign on computer users. A computer uses about as much electricity as somewhere between a radio and a TV set.
Yeah, sure, everybody else keep driving your gas-guzzling Hummers, burn up six batteries per day in your cell phones, produce your weight in garbage every day, exist entirely on manufactured processed foods, and have them put an escalator in the front of the gym so you can ride up and jog for an hour on an electric treadmill while watching a bank of wide-screen TVs. But pretend it's a computer geek with his monitor on sleep mode who's destroying the planet.
My laptop (from where I am currently posting this) uses a 65 watt power brick. It's an 18 month old Lenovo 3000 N100 with 1Gb RAM, dual core 1.8GHz CPUs, and other bits.
Despite using a 65 watt rated power supply I know it is using between 25 and 27 watts (thanks to a Jaycar power meter).
When you are doing the maths for determining power useage you need better data than the stickers on the boxes, or the manufacturer supplied data. They will give you the peak power consumption expected, but the typical day to day useage is often a lot lower.
Given how little power it consumes, I leave it switched on 24x7 and just replaced a few more light fittings around the house with compact flourescent lamps and planted a tree.
Just set your computer to auto start at 55 min before normal start time.
You'll be middle management in no time.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
Our AD policy (since most computers are Windows) forces a powerdown at 7pm (our offices all close at 4:45pm, except for a few.) The user can abort the shutdown by clicking on a button, or can simply reboot. AD policy also exempts the systems we know shouldn't be shutdown (24 hour serivce points.) At this point, we estimate we save about $30,000USD per year in power costs for the 1/3 that have this impliments. (It's a big network.)
Interestingly, our network guys are having trouble routing wake on lan packets accross subnets, so we are looking at a T104 form factor linux appliences with multiple nics to send out WOL commands. Not sure this isn't a brain fart on the part of the network guys, or simply a limitation on how WOL works. Since we have other reasons for wanting a boxen on each network, it's a good excuse.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Actually you'll probably suck some CO2 in while doing so.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Telcordia does shut off the lights at night and they go in a random cycle through the night, in this way not only saves in energy, but at least provide some visibility for those that work at night. Telcordia's offices have sensors. There has also been a movement to turn off unnecessary servers. Also, air conditioning is turned off during the weekends in the summer.
Vi havas e-poston.
My Company has "white" power outlets and "pink" power outlets. Pink outlets provide power 24/7, the white ones all shut off (along with the office lights) when the building alarm is armed. All offices have at least one "pink" outlet so if you really want your PC to stay alive you connect to that one.
Everyone knows that most of the students sit up all night slashdotting, playing WoW, facebooking, digging. The night is the best time to have some "quality time" with you and your computer!
I never shut my computer off, components will last much longer if left running especially hard drives. I have shut computers off at work before for simple things or maintenance, and when you go to turn them back on, they do not run.
One is efficiency. Powersupplies, good ones at least, are quite reliably most efficient at half their rated power. So get a 600 watt power supply, it's efficiency peak will be at 300 watts. Hence it behoves you to buy a powersupply that's double what you need. While the difference generally isn't major (maybe 2-4% between half and full load) if you are spending the money on a quality, efficient supply anyhow, why not get one that runs at its most efficient point?
Another along those lines is if you want a good power supply, your options are sometimes limited. When I went to get mine I wanted a Corsair supply as I really like their design and build, but 520 and 620 were the only two wattage options. Works out ok, I have a very high power system and a 620 is about double what I need so peak efficiency, but regardless I had little choice if I wanted those kind of supplies.
The final reason is if you instead buy a cheap supply that they are rated improperly. First off they are often rated rather unrealistically. A 500 watt supply will only supply 500 watts if it is very cool, and 500 is the absolute max, the failure point (whereas a good one will supply 500 even at 50+ degrees C and can do so without risking failure). Also they often don't have enough power to given rails to meet you needs. So while they might be 500 watts total, there isn't enough amperage on the 12 volt rails for your system, because a large part of that wattage is for other rails (good ones generally have lots of amperage on all rails, often enough that you can't load all rails fully, but provided some are loaded light you can load other heavy).
Hence lots of people buy overspec'd powersupplies either because they've been screwed on cheap ones, because they want a particular good one that is only available in certain ratings, or both. I mostly just wanted to point out that doesn't mean systems draw that much, especially when idle. Many people see computers being put with 500-1000 watt power supplies and assume that means they draw that much power all the time. That's just not the case. You'll find that a system may have a 500 watt power supply but draw only 200 watts when fully loaded and only about 50 when just idling.
About 25 years ago a directive was issued at my then company to shut down PCs at the end of the workday. The objective was to save money on electric power usage.
This lasted all of about two weeks. Perhaps hardware quality has improved since then, but at the time the rate of hardware failures started to climb dramatically. Another directive was issued canceling the first and asking specifically that the PCs be left running and only shut down on weekends.
Is the company a Monday - Friday 9-5 style shop? If it is try this -Program all PC's to do a system update of whatever needs to be done after people leave (around 6 or 7pm) -Program all PC's to do a scheduled shut down after updates are done, but set a 5 minute delay. This way if a user is actively using the system they can cancel the shut down and keep working. -Use a Wake on LAN feature to turn computers back on systematically starting at 7:30/8am. Don't do it all at once because as mentioned the load on the DHCP/Proxies/Domain Controller will be hell. But if you have 1000 pc's break it up in to 1 minute intervals. If you turn on 16 computers every minute for 1 hour then you'll lessen the load and still have everyone's PC's up and running by time they come in.
I've read about diesel backup generator systems that use a huge spinning flywheel to provide enough energy to run the powered systems (for a few seconds) and start the diesel generators when the mains supply fails. They flywheel itself can only output the required power for a short time (like 5 to 10 seconds) and is only used in the transition period between when the mains fail and the backup generators start producing power.
Our IT department has requested that everyone 'log-out' but leave their machines on so that they can be updated. Seems redundant since they also send out an email when new updates are available, and if the updates are not installed within a few days they eventually force the install. Personally, I just update when I see the email and turn my machine off at night mostly out of fear of a head crash and loss of data while I am away.
Several years ago I worked for a defense contractor (Raytheon in case you want to know) as a product trouble shooter. My job was to troubleshoot newly assembled navy communications systems in environments that simulated various user conditions. The test stations consisted of test equiptment controlled by (in most cases) Windows NT PC's. The computers' sole function was to operate the test equiptment and store test data.
I worked largely by myself though occasionally some of the manufacturing test engineers would do software updates or install new test equiptment. Being the last person off shift, before leaving I powered down the PC monitors which were 10-15 year old CRTs (not energy star to say the least). Some of the engineers, who I thought were supposed to know better, got annoyed that I had done this and came up with excuses like 'we expect the computers to be on when we get in' and 'you're interfering with the software drivers' to justify not having to hit the power button to turn the monitor on.
Sooo, the engineers' boss talked to me about it and when I explained to him that the monitor and computer were independent devices, and the monitor consumed about half the power of the computer, and that there was no impact to operation other than simply turning to power switch on and off, he told me that it sound like I might have a good idea... 'you should do a case study on it'.
I could understand why they might want to leave test equiptment (and even the computers) running, but I don't know what was going on inside their heads to justify leaving the monitors on. I suspect they may have been involved in some funky business practices designed to inflate rates. But it just seems like common sense to me to conserve power when its not needed.
Why can I never find any definitive study on the effects of powering down daily on the hard drive life span (or any other affects on the PC)? Even this /. discussion has opinions split down the middle it seems. Anyone?
My company issues everyone a laptop, and everyone has to shut it down and take it home with them every night. After all, most nights, there is going to be at least an hour or two of bug fixes that need to happen, but you don't know about them for a couple of hours after you go home for the evening. It would suck to just sit around the office for another 8 hours until the second shift ends just to see if anything has to be fixed.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Are you smoking crack? There are hundreds of natural gas power stations that spend most of their time idle, waiting for a demand spike that makes them cost-effective.
New York even has a hydro station that pumps water into a man-made lake on a mountain at night, and drains it to generate power during the day.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Shutdown everybody except yourself. Great attitude.
If the network administrators have enacted this policy why should they make it affect their machines? IT administrators, especially the clueful ones, tend to have a handle on their own workstations and will shut them down at night except when the machines are running a large job.
More to the OP's intended point - people like school administration will more often than not be excepted from these policies because they have discretion as to how to handle their machines.
What's with the ire towards IT administrators anyways? Did one of them catch you violating your AUP and lock out your account or something?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
not exactly, the flywheel is there to provide starting crank to the gasoline/diesel generator. by itself, the flywheel's weight uses a negligible amount of energy, but when the power goes out, the start time is instantaneous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptible_power_supply#Rotary
Besides which, every little bit helps. Do you know the amount of energy that could be saved if everybody unplugged those electronic devices that "sleep" when they're not being used?
A substantial amount, no doubt. The problem is that many devices (such as my TV set) need to be live in order to keep their configuration memories alive. Unplug them, and you have to reset the clock, rescan your channels, etc. A supercap would be all that's needed, in many cases, to allow a device to avoid having a standby mode, but many don't have it. This will probably be a case where the Feds have to mandate that all consumer electronics can survive "x" hours of disconnection from the A.C. line.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Under XP on my laptop, hibernate also forces the network adapter into the disconnected state which has the effect of severing all network connections, and causing a dhcp renew when the machine comes out of hibernation. Even suspend does this.
What TCP protocol are you using where this is an issue?
I work at a big company and it never powers down, I lead the graveyard shift and every night when I get here on the way to my "office" (box) I get to see more than 200 monitors displaying ugly screensavers. It is my policy that if I see a computer that's on and it doesn't have a post it note on it saying why I just go and shut it off, the manly DOS way.
Linux, unplug the network chord and packets don't flow, plug it back in and they can. Leave it unplugged long enough and connections will time out, but why would you want them killed any sooner?
Most any TCP connection that isn't a short HTTP web page, or any long duration statefull connection. ssh, scp, X connections, irc, big file transfers, SQL connections to name a few.Then again as you said Windows XP drops all connections. That's not just TCP, that's UDP as well. So then all the programs using stateless UDP sockets will find socket errors on send or receive. Some programs that means restart the program every time it hibernates, suspends, ethernet cable gets disconnected, ethernet switch looses power. I knew there were a few reasons I prefer Linux.
We give the employees the option to shutdown over the weekend. We don't shutdown during the week because we do virus scans, WSUS updates, and push out software at night.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Where I work doesn't even allow us to turn off the lights and it enrages me so. We could save so much money by turning off these unnecessary lights that none of the graveyard shift workers want to have on anyway. There has never been a reason given for why they want them on, but the night shift has asked many times and stated that we'd all like to see some darkness during the week for a change (we do 12 hour shifts). It can't be a precaution to prevent us from sleeping because my boss already lets us take short naps in shifts if we require them, so I really don't see what the deal is with lights. Server rooms look so much cooler in the dark, anyway.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
No kidding. That isn't even funny. Since I've been using Vista, I sometimes come in in the morning to a clean desktop and an icon saying "Your computer was rebooted to install updates." I've never lost any data since I always save before I walk away and certainly before I call it a day; but it's all very surprising since I've supposedly configured Windows Update to ask me before it installs anything. Yet on numerous occasions it has gone ahead and installed stuff overnight and rebooted my computer. All without asking.
Seriously?
The parent post was overly simplistic ... but so is yours. Coal-fired plants have these huge boilers, you see, and it is very difficult to adjust the fuel consumption to the peaks and valleys. As a result, these plants do keep spewing out CO2 at night.
Utilities try and work around this with natural-gas fired generators that run only during the peaks, but the fuel for these plants is significantly more expensive, as is the capital cost of sizing the grid for peaks.
The net result of this: there is a lot of electricity available at night. Large businesses pay way more for electricity at peak. Off-peak loads aren't even measured some times.
In short, the parent is closer to being correct ... turning off machines at night will not make that much of a difference. It's a simple economics and engineering fact.
I'm an engineer by training and a programmer by profession - and I have quite a bit of old hardware running.
1. Starting up anything definitely induces extra wear (thermal changes, power surges, changing states) However, even without any power savings, the wear of starting up in the morning may or may not be greater than the wear of 15 hours of being on for no good reason.
2. There are many, many states in a computer that only exist during startup. There therefore MUST be many, many failure modes which will only be obvious at startup. Some of these are gradual and some not... So as the parent said, perhaps the most important tradeoff is whether you want to a) never, ever power down the machine to avoid those modes being important as long as possible or b) restart machines occasionally just to DETECT such a failure mode as it's happening. I agree that "b" sounds more important in most use cases, as long as a good fraction of these failure modes are gradual, which I personally think sounds likely.
3. From a physical wear point of view, you probably ARE spinning down your HD all the time, whenever you're not using it for a little while.
4. In a complex device (e.g. HD) a friendly power-down (turning it off) should not be considering equivalent to a sudden loss of power (e.g. UPS/power/PSU failure) Things ARE more likely to fail when the UPS dies...
5. Don't ignore the value of purposeful engineering. New ATA HDs are expected to be slept routinely, and are therefore designed with that in mind...
6. I'm confident the above applies to the mechanical spinning part of both HDs and also of all kinds of fans (including of course the PSU fans) In my experience, these are by far the most common significant parts to go bad in a PC... I believe they probably apply in principle to everything else, but I can't be sure.
Overall, I think expanding on #3, if you sleep the machine certainly a lot of other stuff is getting turned off etc. If you don't sleep the machine or any components at all (which you pretty much have to do on purpose at this point) I think the amount of power we're talking about wasting is significantly higher than the typical numbers people are throwing around, and is probably pretty significant.
If you're NOT going to do that, then I have a hard time imagining you're going to save a lot of machine life in a modern machine in any place other than the fans. Which are actually pretty cheap... So to me the summary of this seems to be: a) turn your machine off when you're not using it b) use motherboards etc that can track fan failure and switch off before they burn up, and/or use redundant fans. And listen to when your fan noises change.
I'm totally ignoring failure during the initial burn-in period in the above discussion.
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I've had an instructional lab full of SGIs cranking out projects overnight from the comfort of my home. Shut off the Comms, and the one or two students that were doing exceptional work are now incapable of doing it. Shutting off comms gear isn't easy either. You have to power up and down in exactly th right sequence.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
If you were a taxpayer in his district, I can assure you you wouldn't even be aware of the savings on the school's electric bill and you'd still be asked to approve a school-related property tax increase in the next election.
It doesn't even have to be something particular like you are doing. I have a company that is set to automatically do virus updates and scans starting at 9 pm. That is the latest anyone would be there working. I got a break out a while back and found that someone thought they would save some juice and turned everything off after they left for 5 weeks in a row. I turned the updates and the scans back down and they bitch because it happens when they are working. It appears that leaving them on all night is the only way to ensure they are getting updates and periodic scans. Of course there is the option to turn it off after the scan completes but I think standby is probably good enough.
Short duration hibernation is extremely useful. I've swapped out CPU fans or other such power chord changes. If you are fast enough, that is within a few minutes, all the connections will still be there when it removes (with Linux at least).
All of the computers in our Business and Computer Science building at the local college are shut down at a specific time every night by way of an API call initiated from the server using some visual basic code. It doesn't matter if people forget to turn off the machines because they go off automatically an hour or so after there's supposed to be no-one left in the building.
Are you sure that they don't already produce this excess power so it is there on demand as needed.
I mean I don't know when the last time I came home at three in the morning half drunk, turning all the lights in the house one, every computer on and went into the garage to start welding something and I had to wait for the power company to build up steam in order to clear the brownout I just created.
I'm pretty sure that they don't wait for the voltage to drop before adding steam, fuel or whatever to keep the generator at the same speed. Think about that, My power comes in from 150 miles away, do you think I would notice not having enough power to turn on a few lights at night? And how many other people would do the same thing at the same time when being fed off the same grid? In an ideal world or one your own generator, you might have something. In real life, they put the extra power out automatically. Your not seeing a Co2 savings from idle PCs for 12 hours a day.
Jesus Christ you are retarded.
Yeah, there are SO MANY PEOPLE running around a K-12 school at 6PM. Idiot.
The one or two people who MIGHT be there MIGHT have to click a cancel button that they know is coming!! OMG!!!!!!!
So, let them write a script to set the variable "in_use = 1". Duh.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
My PC has a 500 Watt power supply. I work 8 hours per day - so the machine is wasting up power for the 16 hours per day that I'm not there. That's 8 kilowatt/hours. Price of electricity in the majority of the USA is between 5 and 10c per kW/hr - so the cost to my employer to leave my PC on overnight is between 40c and 80c...let's round it up to $1 for the sake of round numbers.
I'm paid about $50 per hour - but the cost to the company of employing me is much more than that because I consume space, human-resources, IT and management, I get retirement benefits and healthcare - my cost to the company is at least $150 per hour according to our internal accounting. Let's round down to $2 per minute for the sake of easy numbers.
So if it takes me more than about 30 seconds per day to turn the PC off and on again - then it's more cost-efficient for the company that I leave it on than wait for it to reboot every morning.
The machine takes about 4 minutes to go from power-off to running applications - and about a minute and a half to shut down cleanly. So it costs the company $10.50 for me to shutdown and restart each day - for a potential saving of $1 per day. Hence I should logically turn off the monitors (which takes just seconds of my time) - but leave the PC running. Even over the weekend, it consumes only $3 - so it's not worth the time to turn it off and on again unless I plan to be out of the office for at least a week.
Well...that's what I OUGHT to do if the company came first...in practice - I turn it off because I'm trying to save the planet and because it can be rebooting while I'm getting coffee.
www.sjbaker.org
my unnamed government organisation wants to do this but everyone's so fkin lazy it's never gonna happen
Something I have noticed around here is that we have demand meters for businesses. These meters record the surge of electricity needed to power equipment on and you end up paying a surge or demand on top of the power usage. It has been a while since I held a commercial electric account but if I remember right, there were times my demand portion of the bill was higher then my usage in costs.
I have to wonder if it doesn't actually cost more to power on 10,000 computers at one time then it would be to let them hibernate or standby for 12 hours. I ended up putting some capacitors inside the building to offset the demand costs but it costs quite a bit of money to do that too.
No... not really
2000 ish computers on campus, we only turn them off on long weekends (weekends that consist of more than 2 days... like this weekend).
I think it's done using /every. I don't recall, it's been a year since I looked at the batch files.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
They're remarkably small. We tested one of our computers recently to determine just how much it costs to leave them on 24/7 compared to shutting them down 12-14 hours every night...the cost difference district-wide was something like $20,000 a year. That's out of a $50,000,000 district budget.
Yeah I know every bit helps and our primary purpose in the effort *was* to reduce power consumption, but still...it's a drop in the bucket.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Correction: in a *sane* corporate environment, that would be made at a corporate policy level. Sometimes, however, the IT department does things without running them up the chain of command or talking with their users.
In the early '90s, I worked for a company which was shifting from IBM mainframes to unix workstations. The IT department decided that it would be a good idea to configure a cron job to fsck the disk on these workstations, while the filesystem was mounted.
Did you release the code GPL?
Google for "poweroff". It's a nifty piece of software that allows the user to cancel the shutdown you so wish.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Problem is.... people don't log out. They just lock their screens.
All we need now is a small patch that makes automated updates go to shutdown instead of reboot and then have MS do a daily update. Think of the power that could be saved. My GOD, MS might just save the planet.....or not.
Every night at 10pm we power off IP phones. We have about 10k phones on our main campus. These are primarily, lab, cubical, conference room phones that are powered off. We don't touch those used by tech-support, lobbies or breakrooms. We power them back on at 5:30am. We actually save quite a bit of power this way. Every windows system (we do have some linux/mac users) have softphone (software based phone) so you can make calls from your PC to call IT to have your phone powered back on (or not powered off at night if you work from your cube at night).
The Sierra club was founded in May of 1892. Check out their timeline.
This is actually a true story. Some guy had actually the same concerns as you. He ended up putting a screen saver on all computer with a simple message: "Please, shutdown your computer when leaving". That's it. About 80% of the people responded favorably and powered down their computer without any supervision. All it took was a reminder in the form of a screen saver message.
I hope your children will have a different opinion. They will understand it is important to preserve the planet for their own children.
well done to the clever person who posted this. ... let me think.... YES. I know that a lot of busienss near streets and stuff are stupid and leave their lights on at night, but not all do and have you seen the ones behind in a backally or upsairs with their lights on ... i think there are fewer doing that. The design of a network resulting in a requirement to have a standard desktop left on is a bad design. To run servers that cannot change their cpu speed is also bad design. There is no reason to have computers that cannot change their clock speed if they have the potentail to run at high speeds draining a lot of power. Computers that have low power requirements the ability is not as important compared to the ability to spin down harddisks. The only issue is that microsoft does not force power saving modes by default. So a lot of business computers are not doing to be configured to standby etc.
Do any companies power down at night ?
With linux computers, they should spin the hardisks down (dependin on the distro) after an amount of time. Of course this amount of time might be too high... -
Market research; data mining
Product optimisation; finite element analysis
Software builds; distributed application builds
Drug searches; protein folding
There are lots of reasons for getting your hands on super computing power. You just need people who understand the worth of these types of techniques.
It's not even terribly difficult to set up if you add a general purpose virtualisation system like vmware to every machine. You just distribute out the image of the platform you want to run it on and you have a uniform resource. Just a little bit of organisation required.
Deleted
The same at the company I work for. We have a "policy set" screensaver that says "Save energy, Switch off your PC when not in use". We also had an education program, the key point of which was that cost reduction is linked to our bonus scheme and switching off PCs is an easy win reduction. The result is most PCs are switched off. If you are running an overnight batch job you need to stick a "please leave switched on" sticker on your PC to stop someone else from powering it down. Before these initiatives about a third of all PCs were left on every night!
Our building is running a trial for the university campus. Of the 600 computers in the building, over 500 are on permanent power timers, off at 11pm, then back on when you push a button on your room's wall after 6am the next morning.
Has worked rather well, our power consumption has dropped a 1/3 over the six months this has been running.
Haveany of you guys ever been a sysadmin? Get real!
Three reasons why this is an utterly stupid idea:
1. Backup
2. Patching
3. Synchronization
No wonder IT depts get a bad name when there are people around with that attitude. I'm sure you say the same thing to the Chief Executive after you've shut his computer down and he has lost work.
Remeber, we are there to allow people to carry out there work more efficiently. Too many people in IT assume they own the network.
America, Home of the Brave.
I.e., it's already plural.
Your blood is loaded with virus, for example.
I'd call executives *not* rigorously saving important work, sloppy asses. Lots of things can happen that isn't ITs fault.
The trouble with all these 'turn off at night' proposals is that while they will save energy/electricity they won't reduce CO2 production except in a tiny minority of cases. Electricity is primarily generated by very large steam turbine-driven generators. These have run down/up times measured in many hours and so are kept running and burning fuel (so producing CO2) 24/7. This is why many power companies offer cheaper tariffs for overnight use - e.g. Economy 7 in the UK - to try to get some consumption shifted into this wasted standby period. These generators provide the 'base load' of supply, that level which the companies don't expect the demand to fall below. Peaks are then serviced using more expensive faster response systems. If there isn't enough fast response generation to service a peak we get brownouts and blackouts. In the same way turning off a light or unplugging a charger will save electricity, but won't save CO2 in itself. Only when demand is reduced sufficiently to affect the base load for long enough, will the people who set it risk a whole generator being run down and kept off-grid. Only then will CO2 savings be made from reduced electricity consumption. This is why some governments are so keen on increasing nuclear power generation. Every one allows at east some CO2-producing base load generators to be shut-down and actual CO2 output to be reduced. Unfortunately, it's often these same governments that have promoted the misinformation that electricity use and CO2 production are intimately connected.
First of all, it was our "chief executive" (superintendent) who approved this policy. So they'd be facing their own signature when they tried to raise a stink over the policy if it ever happened. And then of course there's the fact that I've already said that administrative staff are exempt from the policy and can leave their PCs on all night if they want, though they risk a shutdown from power failure and that sort of thing (more common around here than they should be)
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
ping ip from 192.168.0.0/24 If ping = great success, then shutdown 192.168.0.1 /switch in 5min and allow user to abort.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The most success I've had getting users to switch off was in an old building with no air-conditioning. During summer it was unbearable. I pointed out to them that switching off monitors and PSUs at the socket would reduce the office temperature by a degree.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
You are the sys admin are you not? Maintaining the operation of the network is YOUR responsibility. That includes maintaining it's carbon footprint.
Push out an update to disable screen savers, turn monitors off after 15 minutes of inactivity, and hibernate after 1.5 hours of inactivity (this saves them from having to boot up after lunch), and set Windows to require administrative privileges to change power management settings.
Piece of cake. If they run Linux s/Windows/Linux above.
So was this different than the CS6400?
I always power down the monitor when I don't use a computer,
even if it goes in power save mode. It saves a few Watt.
I am a systems administrator in a Windows based environment, and we encourage our users to leave their PC's on because we roll out Windows update patches, software updates, and new software to PC's at night.
SMART is not foolproof, but it is the only way I know of to take pre-emptive action against HD failure. At my old job, we implemented smartmon tools. Each machine would run a script that invoked "smartctl -a /dev/hda" (yes, this works in Windows) on startup. We would redirect the output to a common folder on the file server, with a file named for each machine that ran the script. Another program (on the server) would search the common log directory, looking for troublesome SMART conditions. For laptops in the field, it logged to the local hard disk, searched it's own log file at startup, and nagged the user to contact IT if anything was less than kosher. We took pre-emptive action on more than a few hard drives.
My PHB wanted to know why computers did not have this capability right out of the box. I said, "The diagnostic information is readily available, but a system that routinely exposed marginal hard drives would trigger a lot of in-warranty replacements. Without SMART monitoring, there is a chance that at least some of these drives will sputter through the warranty period, so detecting them is not what the manufacturers really want. Microsoft could do this on their own, but their customer is the manufacturer, not us."
For security reasons we never powered down at my last company. For 2 reasons:
1: Hardware
When you turn on hardware is when the hardware has the highest percentage of failure. More specifically, hard drives. First hand experience, for those employees who just didn't follow the rules they had 2x the hardware malfunctions as someone who left their machine on all the time. So if a computer that gets turned on breaks more often, what is it going to be like for you to fix systems that break during power-up with a 8,000 client base? I wouldn't do it.
2: Security
At night is when we ran updates, ran virus scans, monitored systems. If these are ran during the day, you will get complaints and your staff/employees will start shutting down the services in order to work.
Suggestion:
I would look at 'phone book' size computers, like the Dell Optiplex GX270,GX280,620. These systems use much less electricity than their desktop counterparts. We had GX270's with a 175watt pull, compared to 450watt for a desktop. Getting hardware that meets needs, and uses only as much energy resources as needed is where I would start looking. And with 8000 clients, any change here will show massive gain in energy savings.
"When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you." --leonstryker
I work for a hospital, it is corporate policy that the workstations remain on at all times. The reasoning is if there is an urgent patch or something that they need to push they want to make sure everyone gets it. Not everyone complies, but a good 90% of workstations are on permemantly.
If I recall well, the Canadian governement ran a series of ads near the end of the 90es advising us to NOT shutdown and power up our PCs every day, but instead opt to turn off the monitor but leave the machine running. The rationale behind this was that, somehow, powering up your computer ate more electricity than running it for a week. I remember them phrasing it this way quite clearly.
This begs the question, has the situation changed with modern hardware, or where they just full of it to begin with?
Ahhh, true, but you must think like a politician. If you wanted to impress the district superintendent, you show him / her the savings so they could tout that to the budget committee, take full credit for it and insure their own employment longevity.
Isn't that the way it works?
</cynasism_off>
<idealism_on>
As the original poster mentioned, the savings was around $20,000. A drop in the bucket maybe, but it might have funded a part-time teaching position or helped with the music or art programs.</idealism_off>
Every little bit helps. With more people like him, we'd could save more energy and reduce costs and maybe be less dependent on buying energy from people who hate the US.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
It is a drop in the bucket, but $20,000 is nothing to sneeze at, particularly in a school district's budget. That money could be directed to other programs, or maybe just put in a rainy day fund.
The school district nearby where I live would think they'd hit the lottery if someone came up with a $20K savings.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
I work for a small nanotechnology start-up, and when I started here 8 months ago, no one turned off any of the computers. Granted, half of the computers used during the day were personal laptops that VPs and execs would turn off and bring home with them (I'm a big fan of this, aside from the security concerns). I'm a green-nerd, so I ask what's the deal with leaving the computers on, and everyone spouted off funny superstitious mumbo-jumbo about how they've never done it before, maybe it's bad for the computers, they need to be updated with the latest microsoft spyware, etc. So I just started turning them off at night, and nothing's happened. Nothing's gone wrong. (These are also people who don't turn off lights for fear of cockroaches, which, let me tell you, I've never seen). Some employees do access the network at night/on weekends, so we simply leave the server on 24/7. Now my employees say that they always used to turn the lights and computers off at night ;). Oh the precision of memory.
You can always disable that. The admins at my University have done so, and I'm very thankful for it. There are few things more annoying than urgently needing to access your files, but finding the only free terminal in a packed computer lab has been locked by somebody and then abandoned.
Nobody else has this sig.
Granted, it's a small office, but aside from a fileserver and wire machine, everything is shut down. At least in theory. At the very least everything goes into sleep mode.
Not included in this is hard drives spinning down. On anything I have my hands on (everything, again in theory) I'd rather not be spinning everything up and down all day. Too much wear and tear. Everything's a compromise, of course: would you rather have powerup/powerdown potential problems, or would you rather have the machine sucking in dirt 24/7? Dust is mostly human skin, and a good conductor to boot.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
If they saved 20,000 they would get 20,000 less next year.
Oh wow! From the posts above I can clearly tell /. has a huge sysadmin crowd!
' NAME: shutdown.vbs' /every:M,T,W,Th,F "shutdown.vbs"
'This script will run through a range of IP addressess, pinging them.
'If it gets a response to the ping it will initiate a shutdown of the
'remote address if it is a Windows system. It then continues with the
'next IP address in the range. The range of IPs also allows for exceptions.
'Usage: Edit the username to that of an account with shutdown rights on your LAN.
' Add in a password or if necessary multiple passwords. Multiple passwords
' require the adjusting of the value in the Dim arrPassword(x) field. The x
' here must be the number of passwords minus one.
' Next add in the lower and higher IP address bounds. If there are addresses
' in this range you don't want shutdown then add them into the exceptions
' string.
'Scheduling the script: Either configure a re-occurring scheduled task
' or at a command prompt, browse to the folder containing
' this script and type:
' AT 21:00
'Note: This script deals only with IP addresses.
'Note: This script is incapable of shutting down the PC it is running on
Exactly. Unfortunately there is very little incentive for the government to ever save money.
On Error Resume Next
Const oShutdown = "5" 'force shutdown, can have many values
strUsername = "administrator"
'////////*****If you have more then one password add in more arrPassword(x)= "Passwordx" and adjust the Dim statement*****/////
Dim arrPassword(1)
arrPassword(0)= "somepassword"
arrPassword(1)= "anotherpassword"
'////////*****Exceptions:Just add in the IPs (This script knows nothing of DNS) you wish to have excluded as part of the below 'string. *****/////
strExceptions="127.0.0.1, 10.1.1.1, 192.168.1."
'Enter in the lower bound of the IP address range here, enter in the octets in decimal form.
IPLowerAddress1 =192
IPLowerAddress2 =168
IPLowerAddress3 =1
IPLowerAddress4 =1
'Enter in the upper bound of the IP address range here, enter in the octets in decimal form.
IPUpperAddress1 =192
IPUpperAddress2 =168
IPUpperAddress3 =1
IPUpperAddress4 =255
CurrentThrdOctet = IPLowerAddress3
CurrentFrthdOctet = IPLowerAddress4
Do While CurrentThrdOctet IPUpperAddress3
Do While CurrentFrthdOctet 255
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strCurrentComputerName=IPLowerAddress1 & "." & IPLowerAddress2 & "." & CurrentThrdOctet & "." & CurrentFrthdOctet
If InStr(strExceptions, strCurrentComputerName) Then
CurrentFrthdOctet=CurrentFrthdOctet+1
Else
Set objExec = objShell.Exec("ping -n 2 -w 1000 " & strCurrentComputerName)
strPingOutPut = LCase(objExec.StdOut.ReadAll)
If InStr(strPingOutPut, "reply from") Then
Set oLocator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
For Each strPassword in arrPassword
Set oConnection = oLocator.ConnectServer(strCurrentComputerName, "root\cimv2", strUsername, strPassword)
Set OpSysSet = oConnection.ExecQuery("Select " & "Name From Win32_OperatingSystem")
For Each opSys In OpSysSet
opSys.win32ShutDown(oShutdown)
next
CurrentFrthdOctet=CurrentFrthdOctet+1
Next
Else
CurrentFrthdOctet=CurrentFrthdOctet+1
End if
End If
Loop
CurrentFrthdOctet=0
Loop
If CurrentThrdOctet = IPUpperAddress3 Then
Do While CurrentFrthdOctet = IPUpperAddress4
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strCurrentComputerName=IPLowerAddress1 & "." & IPLowerAddress2 & "." & CurrentThrdOctet & "." & CurrentFrthdOctet
If InStr(strExceptions, strCurrentComputerName) Then
CurrentFrthdOctet=CurrentFrthdOctet+1
Else
Set objExec = objShell.Exec("ping -n 2 -w 1000 " & strCurrentComputerName)
strPingOutPut = LCase(objExec.StdOut.ReadAll)
If InStr(strPingOutPut, "reply from") Then
Set oLocator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
For Each strPassword in arrPassword
Set oConnection = oLocator.ConnectServer(strCurrentComputerName, "root\cimv2", strUsername, strPassword)
Set OpSysSet = oConnection.ExecQuery("Select " & "Name From Win32_OperatingSystem")
For Each opSys In OpSysSet
opSys.win32ShutDown(oShutdown)
next
CurrentFrthdOctet=CurrentFrthdOctet+1
Next
Else
CurrentFrthdOctet=CurrentFrthdOctet+1
End If
End If
Loop
End If
WScript.Quit
Depending on the type of load each company has throughout the day/night, there are usually high and lows in the overall system usage which can be used to save some power apart from simply going virtual.
:)
VMware has cool management tools for this and the shutting down of systems is managed by Distributed Power Management (DPM). http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/drs.html Has more details.
So not only can you save power with shutting down servers, but the HVAC systems get their load reduced as while the servers are off. Mind you this only works well (automagically) with newer systems that support Wake on Lan (WoL).
Otherwise have your NOC monkeys take care of it instead of sleeping
-- Robi
He said the plan is to tie it into building security eventually. If you haven't scanned your ID tag on the way in, it won't let you start up your machine. Then on the way out, if your machine is still on it'll turn it off. Just don't forget to save before you go outside for a smoke break!
Verdiem: http://www.verdiem.com/
Surveyor product: http://www.verdiem.com/surveyor/default.asp
Ecogeek article: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1270/
Paste the last 3 parts into one file. Name the file shutdown.vbs. Edit the IP address ranges to suit your network, add to the exclusion list if necessary. Adjust the username and passwords to reflect those of an account with rights to shut down PCs on your network. Save the file.
Create a scheduled task to run the script.
Only works on running on Windows and against Windows. QQ
Don't be afraid to test it first to see how it runs/functions. Probably best to actually.
anonymous helps?? o.0
Yes, powering down at night can save you money, and it can reduce your carbon footprint but it sounds like you are trying to use this as a method of securing your network which i would not suggest. As far as powering down your systems, if you have a budget then use it. If you have management software, use that too. Many large networks use some sort of management software, either SMS or something similar. There are always tools available with this. Some good SMS add-ons can be found here: http://www.1e.com/Downloads/Index.aspx (no affiliation aside from that we use the software). These tools give you the option to only shut down computers which no one is logged into, or you can be more strict and force systems to shut down at a specific time, it is very flexible. If you do not have any such thing and you do use AD then simply get creative with your policies. You can use power management policies which were mentioned earlier such as EZ GPO http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_mgt_ez_gpo or you can get creative with your logon scripts. Just be sure to test them first. If you are simply trying to thwart viruses maybe you should look into a unified threat management appliance which can stop them at your gateway.
You may find this interesting. I used to work at a nuclear power plant. The cooling reservoir was connected via a spillway to a nearby river. To cover peak loads, there was a hydroelectric plant on the spillway. At night, the power company I worked for bought tons of cheap electricity from another utility to run the hydro plant backwards to refill the reservoir.
The plant I worked at stayed running at 100% the whole time, but as far as I know, its power was not used to refill the reservoir. I assume that was because the utility that owned the plant could sell that station's power for more than it was paying the other utility for the power to refill the reservoir.
One of the engineers told me it took approximately twice as much power to refill the lake as was obtained by draining it, and this happened on a fairly nightly basis during the summer. I used to run a few miles at the plant every morning, and there were usually fishermen trying to get as close to lake side of the dam as possible without getting chased off by the guards. The churning water apparently stirred up a lot of stuff and attracted the hungry fish in the lake.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
"screen" is ideal in such situations. Not so helpful in other circumstances though. I would love to be able to resume X connections or drop and resume from elsewhere. I believe there's commercial software that makes this possible (VNC comes close but is not quite good enough in all situations). Course, that means you also have to be running the X-Server "proxy" on the (a) remote server.
Rich
Yeah, it was the same with dialup and ICS. Particularly annoying when I was working in a place with dodgy phone lines... Connection goes down, all those large file transfers die instantly even if the same IP address could be obtained when redialled. With Linux, the system would redial and the transfer would continue where it had left off providing it hadn't timed out.
Microsoft have a very skewed view about proper operation sometimes. This also happens in open source but its strength is that someone can provide a better solution and if it's truly better, it will get adopted and become the standard.
Circa 1985, I was an intern at a NASA center. We had a batch job that was running for months, and no one could figure out why. Turns out the job required just over a week to run, and someone was turning the computers off every weekend. Come Monday morning, the computer would reboot, the job would restart, and would run until 80% or so completion before the computer was turned off and the whole mess started over again!
Are you sure that they don't already produce this excess power so it is there on demand as needed.
There isn't a dial on the operator's board to dial up a specific wattage. Generating stations have basically no control of EXACTLY how much power they produce--much of that has to do with the load it sees on the interconnected grid. Power output is basically determined by how much force the turbines can "push" against the generators. The more demand on the grid, the harder the generators are to turn.
A generating station can technically produce zero power, or even negative net power (in that case the generators are behaving like electric motors plugged into the grid, but this isn't something that would happen often), but they keep on turning at 3600 RPM. All generators that are on-line on an interconnected grid basically turn perfectly in sync.
I'm pretty sure that they don't wait for the voltage to drop before adding steam, fuel or whatever to keep the generator at the same speed. Think about that, My power comes in from 150 miles away, do you think I would notice not having enough power to turn on a few lights at night? And how many other people would do the same thing at the same time when being fed off the same grid?
If people left lights on like office workers left PCs on, then you'd notice soon enough--but not right at that moment. You'd notice when you saw your next bill. First of all, the laws of supply and demand apply--more demand means higher spot price for electricity. Second of all, generators do in fact burn more fuel when there is more power demand and dial back when demand does away (it is all computer controlled and they can respond to demand in seconds). That means more emissions, and more fuel costs to be passed onto you.
I worked in Japan at a company where *everything* was turned off after hours, heat/ac, lights, computers, everything, I assume the security system was still running though. Lights and monitors were also turned off during lunch breaks. It was a little inconvenient in winter coming in the morning and having to endure morning meetings freezing in my winter coat before the building got warm enough to take it off, thankfully Japanese winters are relatively mild.
My first day there I left my monitor on during lunch and when I returned someone had left me a little note not to do that again.
We operate about 200 remote PC's throughout our organization. Most are "retail" customer-facing computers where the operators are only on-site from 8am to 5pm. Since they are dedicated POS systems, there is no reason (other than app updates) to leave them on. Since no one followed the printed policy, we embedded an automatic shutdown into the POS application to force shutdown between 6pm and 6am (shutdown is indicated by an app server so tweaking the local clock doesn't prevent it). The operator is presented an "override" screen where they have 5 minutes to continue operating for another 1/2 hour if they click a button. Since the machines are touch screen, we display the override in a random position on the screen so the operators don't leave something leaning against it to trigger the button click.
Shame we had to implement it, but it costs the company a load of money annually to leave them on, plus it creates it's own set of headaches at night when we're trying to do updates.
I usually address loose connections by using cable ties and lockable connectors, rather than with software.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
"Green" may be a fad, but energy efficiency probably isn't (unless fusion researchers come up with something really awesome). What is "neat" about energy use, is that most people tend to pay (roughly) in proportion to what they use. Use less energy, save money. Roughly. When people save money, they're not just feeling good about themselves: they're feeling good. They're not improving the world for future generations: they're improving it for themselves, in the here and now. Efficiency can be selfishly motivated, without having to leave it to altruism.
Don't throw words like "true" around. Not because it isn't accurate, but because it isn't useful. Even selfish people can be used to ultimately serve the treehugger agenda. Treehuggers should rejoice over that.
The only thing ridiculous about that, is that they told anyone. If they saved money, they could still silently benefit from the "greenness". So go ahead, make fun of the posturing, but not the activity itself."Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This is because MS Windows needs to be updated so often they automate the process and do it remotely in the evening (usually requires a reboot). So much for "green computing."
The idea of putting Windows machines into sleep or hibernate mode sounds great in theory. It's too bad that most Windows devices and device drivers fail to "wake up" correctly from these modes.
Example: I have a Belkin UPS that requires a proprietary driver and applet for the "auto-shutdown when the power goes out" functionality. Unfortunately their driver crashes every time I wake the computer up from sleep mode. I actually went so far as to debug their driver for them, pinpoint the null pointer dereference and the crash stack, and provide a crash dump to Belkin's technical support... handed them the diagnosis on a silver platter... and of course they never looked into it or released a fix.
Another example: I have a new HP printer that (again) requires a proprietary driver and applet to get any reasonable functionality out of the printer. Every time the computer resumes from standby, their driver somehow hangs the entire print queue. You can keep printing documents, and they keep going into the queue, but the printer doesn't start (even though it is powered up and the printer details claim it is printing). It takes a hard reset of both the printer AND the PC to fix this.
And these examples aren't flukes. I would estimate, based on my own experience with a wide variety of WinXP/Vista PCs and devices, that at least 40% of devices and/or device drivers do not function correctly when put to sleep and woken up again. Either the drivers crash (or worse, cause your machine to BSOD), or the device mysteriously disappears and never comes back, or the device works but exhibits abnormal behavior.
Until manufacturers start placing priority on the sleep/resume functionality of their products and drivers, consumers won't be able to use those modes, and so they will just keep leaving their desktops on all the time.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Yeah! How about green Hummers for the three most energy efficient employees? Woohoo!
If you power down your systems at night, then BOINC won't work!
eliminate running bots, protect yourself from the next virus outbreak, keep your data safe
If you gave a shit about any of the above, you'd have got rid of Windows already.
you had me at #!
Where the moron describes 'being green' as a fad.
Clearly they live on another planet. I hope their SUV plunges into a polluted lake some time soon... fatally.
you had me at #!
My boss and I walk around and turn the lights out before we leave. I figure that helps, some.
At first glance I had the thought that we only use our electronics for 1/3 of the day. 8 out of 24 hours. But that's not the case. People show up for work as early as 7 and stay as late as 7, so there is someone here for half the day. 12 out of 24 hours. I don't know what the relevance is but I thought I'd share that.
Anyway, if computers were scheduled to auto shutdown (not just "sleep"), at 8PM and auto boot at 6AM I think there would be some significant power savings. Especially in our older PowerMac G5 rigs, of which we have several.
But the biggest savings in my building would probably be better insulation. Our heater and cooling systems run constantly - sometimes together! - because our windows are not terribly well sealed. In some offices you can actually feel the cold air moving through the room. This in turn causes the employees to run their own heaters and fans to adjust their office, which throws the central system into confusion and makes it run that much more.
And honestly, the biggest issue of all those things is that, and I'm going to get torn a new one for this, women do not dress appropriately. They dress "cute" instead of dressing for the environment. If you come to your office every day and you're cold every day, wear something warmer. A short skirt and blouse in January with a space heater blowing up your legs is not acceptable.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
You obviously have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about, really. But hey, don't believe me! Just go to your local power plant and ask them DO YOU PROVIDE 100% POWER OUTPUT 24/7?
Sorry, but you're plain wrong. Disclaimer for myself is that my father works for an energy company and manages various power stations.
Gas powered stations do EXACTLY what you say doesn't happen - they vary their power usage according to demand. You create less demand, less fuel is burned. It's a simple fact.
OMG, do you seriously not understand how power plants work? Because they aren't putting 100% on the grid doesn't mean they aren't burning the fuels neccesary to do so at a moment's notice.
You really have to compartmentalize the sources of power and the delivery of it. A power plant isn't a car where you press the gas pedal and it increases the fuel. They usually run off of steam created from coal fired furnaces. If the demand increased because 50% of the city turned their lights on, creating more steam fast enough to keep it seamless would be impossible so the have a reserve capacity that can be applied at a moment's notice. If you aren't using this reserve, it is being waisted.
Have you thought this through or do you just assume you know it all?
Lets be honest here - any well-bedded down installation of any main stream operating system results in a machine that takes a painful amount of time to start up.
... must detect its hardware and software and configuration environment and finally provide you access to the operating system.
... that's YOUR time your crappy operating system and software are biting into, and that's not OK.
... is not in our personal best interest. Because the computer is still loading acrobat or the creative mixer.
First, the computer has to detect all of its hardware. Then the operating boot loader loads up, detects its hardware environment and begins loading drivers. And finally the operating system must detect its hardware environment and configure itself for use, load in all the cruft that has somehow wound up in the startup sequence before finally asking who you are. With your credentials provided, the operating system loads the shell which
Y A W N.
The hardware and software technologies that make laptops more than a small niche market seem to struggle to make their firm stamp on the desktop scene. Most modern PC hardware and software has some sort of "standby" concept but either it doesn't exactly power down or some device in the system counteracts it (I've come across no less than 9 big-vendor, high-price NIC cards that will generate a wakeup event on media disconnect - such as the one caused by the device going to sleep/powering down, even when the device is configured to allow standby mode).
A few weeks ago I accidentally put my Windows XP gaming box into standby while getting up to go to the store. I was amazed to find it still in standby when I returned. Unlike previous instances of standby it didn't wake on a keyboard input, the machine is actually powered down, not consuming any power and I had to press the power button to boot it back up. I assumed it had come out of standby itself and crashed and powered off. It spent more time going thru the POST than it did booting back into Windows. Try and imagine my shock along with my frustration that I would have to fetch another soda and more screenwipes.
But I was an instant convert. It takes 1/30th of the time to put this box into standby compared to the time it takes to shutdown and it takes 1/70th of the time to get from off state to responding operating system from a post-shutdown power on. In short, when I get to my computer to use it, I hit the power switch, pull up my chair, sit down, crack open my sode, turn on the LCD monitor and by the time its powered up, I can make use of my mouse cursor.
Think about all the time your PC spends checking for new hardware - every reboot, every power on, and all the PnP support for USB devices and etc. I'll admit its handy, but I'd bet 80%+ of PCs don't change hardware configuration - servers all around the world, back-room spreadsheet crunchers that grandpas and dads use to calculate their taxes once a year... And all those rental/lease office workstations that run for 2 years with a single static configuration but still spend 3-5 minutes every day setting themselves up almost as if for the first time.
And I'm not just talking about operating systems, I'm talking about the whole experience - bios, bootstrap, OS and desktop.
Infact, in most offices the "off"ers are generally using the excuse to do 10 minutes less work a day.
For the rest of us, nothing sucks worse than turning your PC off and then something calling you back to your desk and you have to wait while it powers up. Now you're on unpaid overtime waiting for your computer to start up
So we leave our PC on. Maybe we turn off the monitors (more likely if they are LCDs) - but anything that's going to eat YOUR time, anything that's going to emphasise the minute you ran late this morning when your boss comes in and you can't bring up an editor or a spreadsheet
I know - 10 minutes is pretty trivial when its the fate of the planet we're talking about; but its t
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Use thin clients that draw minimal power and host desktops on the server side, either using an OS instance on the server for each user, or a terminal server type setup. Sun's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure initiatives are great for this. Virtual machines can be suspended when not in use and are trivial to bring back online. Added bonus: Users can work from off-site with minimal effort.
You see, they establish a baseload, then calculate a required reserve. Now this reserve can be spinning or non-spinning but it doesn't matter because we are talking about steam powered generators (coal/oil fired electric generation) which means they have to have the power to push demand when needed. And seeing how you cannot build steam in seconds, they create more pressure then they need to turn the generators and regulate the flow driving them based on the current demand. When demand goes up, more steam is used, when it goes down, less is used. But that doesn't touch the fact that the steam is already there and available for when the load changes.
This concept isn't anything new, it is a base from all non nuclear steam powered systems. You simply cannot create steam in seconds with coal and oil fired boilers. Lol.. Again with the part of the process we aren't concerned with. They don't trip for ten minutes at a time and they don't trip longer for demand. It is doubtful that everyone turning lights on would trip them at all because most sane systems have a required system reserve which ensures capacities larger then the current usage. If your country isn't one of them then I feel for you. I don't know how I would be able to cope with such an unstable electrical delivery system.
By the way, do yourself a favor a lookup spinning reserve, non-spinning reserve, Operating reserves, baseload and baseload demands as they pertain to commercial electrical generation and delivery networks. And Yes, I am talking about the electric that goes to your home.
Oh, and by the way, I looked up spinning reserve on google, and it just proves my point: Also: Do yourself a favor, and shut up.
Maybe if you could show us an efficient way to create steam without nuclear fuels in the short periods of time that is necessary for grid operation, you could save the world from Global Warming as well as save the power companies tons of money.