Slashdot Mirror
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'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?
The answer is simple. Tiny minority of the computers that are on could still be used by someone doing something important. You do not want to cut them off from the network.
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).
I did a project in My Campus with more than 8000 desktop computers.
It saved something like 33% power consumption (measured, before and after).
after midnight all desktops that are not in the excluded list hibernate automatically.
I used python + MFC . Was very easy and simple.
It is time for the Sysadmins start to program and make better use from the technology (not just, next-next-finish)..
And I didn't receive any raise besides saving a lot of money to University.
Shameless promotion: Looking for a new job in developed country.
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.
The top three "energy efficiency" people are the people taht never show up for work and leave their computers off all the time.
False certainty characterises a bit too much of dialogue on the internet, I think, and makes it hard to be careful and humble in discussion. If I felt more sure of what I were saying, I'd have phrased it differently :) Presumably :P
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I'm against anyone working after 2 p.m., myself.
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.
The student who walked away from (or, fell asleep at) the PC without saving learns a valuable lesson.
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.