scheduling shutdowns

mark_s0

Hi all,

The company I work for are currently trying to gain some kind of energy efficiency ISO accreditation to try and lower power costs, paper wastage etc..

One of our objectives set by our COO is to lower power costs by turning off pc's overnight. We have a number of what we call General Access pc's (we're an education institute) and we are looking to have them automatically shutdown at midnight.

I was wondering if any of you have this sort of thing implemented and how you went about doing it? Whether you used scripting or certain software?

What we are trying to achieve is to shutdown but have the user be prompted 10mins before and hopefully supply a desktop icon to allow the user to abort the shutdown if need be.
We were looking at using schtasks.exe and the shutdown command as a start but we're finding that creating a customised prompt isn't working because the comment needs to be put in speech marks and because the task itself has to be put in speech marks it's not recognising the comment causing the task to fail.

i.e.

schtasks.exe /various switches/ /TR "c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 600 -f -c "comment goes here""

This will not work because of the speech marks put in the -c switch. This was something we were hoping to put in a logon script.

This isn't something i've ever done before so the above might seem a silly way of doing it.

Any thoughts? I'd be interested to hear how you guys are implementing this sort of thing.

Mark

Devilsbane

I actually used a command like that for a small lab I was maintaining. I found no use to have them on at midnight. And then the user can just turn it back on the next morning.

Do you really need a comment? If it is scheduled to go off at 8PM, and all of the users leave at 6, then nobody will ever see the comment anyway. Just educate your users on the new policy. Give a generous amount of time (5-10 mins+) so that they have time to save if for some reason they are still working. Also educate them about the shutdown -a command (to abort the shutdown) just in case they are staying late to do some work. (You could even create a batch file for the shutdown -a command and stick it on all of their desktops, but again, educate the users on what it is good for.

Otherwise, you can just create a scheduled task to run a batch command that then points to the %logonserver% to run a script. That way your script is centrally managed, so if you decide 10 minutes isn't long enough, it is a quick fix. Plus your -c "gnkgnsjkfgns" would work.

So schtasks.exe /various switches /TR [URL="file://\\%logonserver%\start.bat"]\\%logonserver%\start.bat[/URL]

Then start.bat will be something along the lines of shutdown -s -t 600 -c "Your computer is restarting. Run shutdown -a to abort.