Power Management/policies

[hipsterdoofus]

Hello all -

 

Coming from a public library scenario here, so I think I'd match up best with other libraries or possibly public schools. I was curious how you do power policies. I would think that the best thing to do would be to allow a computer to sleep after closing time, but would still need to allow for things that happen overnight, such as Antivirus scans & WSUS updates. Just interested in how others have set this up.

 

Thanks,

[robjduk]

I would say in a perfect world you would have everything shut down at close time via script and have a wake on lan system to start the hardware at opening. If you are lucky enough to have SCCM onsite you can set that up to wake them during the night to run maintenance tasks.

I would avoid sleeping the units as if they don't restart, they wouldn't pick up new software or install updates.

[rich_tech]

Sleep/Hibernate can be very problematic with power and updates on older hardware I found on our site, their disabled and we use spiceworks to startup and shutdown our site (though we will be moving to scripts soon as spiceworks intel power manager plugin seems to be failing at starting the site up and shutting it down at the moment).

[hipsterdoofus]

Sleep/Hibernate can be very problematic with power and updates on older hardware I found on our site, their disabled and we use spiceworks to startup and shutdown our site (though we will be moving to scripts soon as spiceworks intel power manager plugin seems to be failing at starting the site up and shutting it down at the moment).

 

Yeah I think that is precisely why we hadn't done much in the way of management in the past; however, I'm pretty sure that on newer hardware it works better. All of our hardware is fairly recent. It also looks like there is a group policy setting to allow WSUS Windows updates to wake a computer.

 

Additionally, I didn't realize before that you can stack power preferences and have a default and then also have one that only takes affect during certain hours. I may do that especially with monitor sleep time, etc, so that it goes to sleep much quicker after hours.