Power Management: Shutdown without Headaches (aka Wakeups)

One of the biggest downfalls of Altiris Deployment Server, especially for today's IT staff (with companies signing new green policies and what not), is the serious lack of powerful features available for power management. Yes there are shutdown and restart and wakeup commands, and you create a "simple" schedule for one set of computers (at different times), but what I'm talking about here is the ability to take control of the power management and create rules that make things easier on you and your team.

The simplest rule I'd like to see, which I thought would have come standard, is the ability for Altiris to know "If the computer is off, don't shut it down". This is especially annoying with the problems of WSUS where it will go to restart your computer at night and get stuck on shutdown. A person would come in the morning, move the mouse and the computer will restart from the hanging shutdown, but Altiris doesn't know this and once the computer is on it will shut down again, VERY ANNOYING. Also the fact that Altiris has to wake up a computer to shut it down is just silly, this wastes time and power (money).

So with some research, testing, determination and the help of many people on these forums, I've come up with a workable solution to not having a PC wakeup to shutdown. What this solution does is read from the SQL database each computer's current icon, if it is on but not logged on (value 2), on and logged on (value 25), or off (value 0 or 41). It then does what you want it to do in comparison to the condition you have set. This format also allows for scheduling a shutdown so you can set it to go every 1 day at anytime. Once it's completed it will reschedule for the next day. You could potentially use this for other instances as well. Say you need to install software ONLY when a computer is NOT logged on. For instance, you could set a condition that will run to say a job was not completed because someone was logged into that computer... but that's another article.

For now let's start working on this shutdown problem!

Step 1. Create a new job and call it "Shutdown", or whatever name you'd like really.

Step 2. Leave the Task Pane of the "Default" condition empty. Create a new Condition called "Computer On"

Step 3. In the Condition Settings window Click "Add" and insert these details, then click OK:

Field: User Defined Token
Operation: contains
Value: 2
Token: %#!computer@icon%

Step 4. Click "Add" again and insert these details, then click OK:

Field: User Defined Token
Operation: contains
Value: 25
Token: %#!computer@icon%

Step 5. Right click the "AND" in the middle and change it to "OR" then click OK

Step 6. In the task pane you can add how you want to shutdown a PC. I use the Altiris shutdown power control, this allows for feedback and it also allows for end user to cancel or postpone the shutdown for a period of time. Just before that I also include a Kill Screen Saver script using pskill.exe, this stops that nasty screen saver hang on some machines when shutting down.

Step 7. Create another new condition, this time called "Computer Off". We are going to do exactly what we did with conditions before, but this time we are going to change the values to 0 and 41. See below

Step 8. Once you have created the conditions, in the task pane create a "Run Script" task and type the following into the "Run this script:" box, then click next

REM Computer Already Shutdown
EXIT 1

Step 9. Under Script Run Location select "Locally on the Deployment Server" and untick "Run when agent is connected" then click next

Step 10. In other return codes, click Add. And type the following (and don't forget to untick "Add to Master return code list"):

Code: 1
Response: Continue
Result: Success
Status: Computer already shutdown, task complete

Step 11. Once you click finish your shutdown procedure is ready to go!

This works well for me, managing 400 computers in a college with both staff and student pc's, with different shutdown times and running WSUS.

This is my first article so any improvements or criticism is certainly welcome!