I was wondering if anyone could recommend any Free utilities that may be good in a Domain network environment to schedule the powering off of computers on a network. In the school district that I manage IT for we have about 2500 Windows based Desktops and about 150 or so iMacs. I am not very worried about the iMacs as the teachers in those rooms seem to make sure they are taken care of pretty well. However every night there are literally over a 1000 desktops left on. In the past we used Ghost Solutions Suite to send a shutdown task to the workstation at a specified time. The time intervals were different depending on what the workstation was used for. For example we would shut down labs at 4:30 but keep office desktops on until about 8pm. The only thing ghost was not good at was giving any warning before the shut down happened. Since our Ghost solution was a bit aged we recently implemented Altiris Deployment solution which Symantec also owns but I have a problem with their shut down tasks. I have been round and round with support and posted on two popular forums that specialize in Altiris and its software. The problem I have is that the Altiris tasks always want to wake up the computer even if it is a simple shut down task. We use WOL to turn computers on remotely that we need to manage so losing that functionality would also not be good. Not to mention even if WOL is disabled in the BIOS or for some reason did not work the task wants to run the next time the computer is on. So essentially we had computers being manually turned on in the morning and were shutting down as people were trying to log into them. Not Good. After weeks of dealing with forums and support I have been pretty much told "That's how it is" and desperately need a utility that can assist me in making sure computers are shut down each night. So if anyone can help me on that I would appreciate it otherwise I have to VPN in each night and find the computers left on and selectively shut those down.
To add to insult our Building and Maintenance Manager tried to make Technology pay for 50% of the Electric Bill and is basically saying that computers are the reason the bill is so high. So I want to do my part and be green as possible and show the district that there is a good chance that almost all of the computers are powered off each night and off when not in use.
Please help an overworked educational IT person. Thank You.
