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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?"
On a Windows XP system, you also want to set the CPU performance in the default power profile to "ADAPTIVE". I'd actually think you'd do well to set the hard drives to spin down and the monitor to turn off after 15 or 20 minutes, set the system to suspend after 30 or 45 minutes, and hibernate after an hour and a half to two hours. You might have to exempt some systems from hibernating - some software and drivers don't always react well to hibernate, and it would be a pain in the (*#)(@ to have to restart after lunch or every meeting. Suspend is a good middle ground. With something more disruptive, a company could well look at that and say "it's not worth the few minutes per day of productivity loss, when factored against the employee's salary + benefits cost." Especially if it leads to calls to your internal helpdesk to try to recover documents in progress or some other work. By the way, productivity vs. conservation is one of the reasons organizations need to be given incentives to conserve power if we want them to do it before energy prices actually exceed cost per hour of labor.
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).
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.
Or, you could just use the power management features present in every PC and OS since 1994 and have them go into standby or suspend.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.