H&S Thing...

[Oops_my_bad]

It's interesting this has been brought up - at our place a notice has gone round asking people to shut their PC's off at night (news to me). But it could be something to do with the electrics in this place having just been condemmned, and the electrical feed into the build being very, very warm to touch!

[Sylv3r]

Our computers are always shut down on a schedule on a night and do not turn on automatically on a morning - we let the users do that and the school yearly electricity bill is £65k.

 

I would hate to see how much it would be if the computers are left longer then the 4:00PM shutdown - although they would use too much up individually over a year 700 computers must pull some power through.

[Joanne]

well when I've come in this morning there are 86 machines showing on vncon... just seems to be odd ones dotted about everywhere.

 

anyway, I had someone ringing me from capita yesterday asking if i wanted a job... working with SIMs and installing it in schools around blackburn and doing general tekkie things. Not sure what to do.... we have a thing about them!!

[sahmeepee]

I made separate batch files for shutting down different sets of PCs, but they all take this format:

@for /F "eol=# tokens=1,2 delims=," %%i in (X99.txt) do @ping -n 1 -w 750 %%i |find "TTL=" >nul && @shutdown -s -m \\%%i -t 0 -f -c "shutdown batch (run by %username%)" & @sleep -m 750 & @echo %%i shutting down...

 

X99.txt contains a list of your computers in this format:

 

#FQDNs and mac addresses of X99-01 to X99-03
#
X99-01.domain.blah, 0011760d57e9
X99-02.domain.blah, 0011760d57d6
X99-03.domain.blah, 0011206a3012

 

(the mac addresses aren't required for this, but I use the same text files for my wake-on-lan scripts.

 

You will need a copy of sleep.exe if you want this to run through steadily rather than blasting through the whole lot at the same time.

 

Also, it needs to be run as a batch file. Running it from the commandline as is will not work because of the escaped (doubled) percent signs.

[pete]

So fires are ok in the daytime, just not at night?

 

Does this mean I should be putting a Halon dump* in the server room?

 

 

*yes, I know we can't use Halon any more.

[elsiegee40]

For information:

I have just looked up the Forced Logoff path in Group Policies:

 

Group Policies:

Computer Settings > Windows settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options

Enable " Network: Force logoff when logon hours expire"

 

Obviously this only applies to logons where you have set Logon Hours in AD (fortunately you can do this by selecting all the users in an OU in one go!) Logon Hours in AD only controls when a user can logon, it doesn't force them off outside those hours.

Edited February 6, 2008 by elsiegee40

[enjay]

So fires are ok in the daytime, just not at night?

Sort of. Fires during the day are usually spotted quite quickly, however night-time ones can burn for much longer before anyone notices, therefore cause much more damage.

 

Of course, that is made somewhat redundant by the current fire regulations which state you must have detection as well as alert systems...

[adamchapman]

Hi,

 

We use a simple utility called pwr0ff30 that creates a system service to auto shutdown at a specified time...

 

Adam

[dbrown]

I've just read this thread with interest and I see there may be a risk here.

To assess the risk I'd be interested to know if anyone has any info on the frequency of PC fires.

Personally I've never experienced any serious electrical fault in any computer equipment, nor have I heard of anything like this from colleagues (and I've been involved with computers in schools since pre-380Z days.) I have heard of laptop batteries overheating (and maybe catching fire?), but this is only through the press, so I wonder whether it is true or accurate.

 

If it turns out (as I would suspect) that none of the millions ( maybe billions by now?) of PC's around the world has ever caused a fire, then perhaps one would be justified in regarding this putative hazard as an insignificant risk.