Deployment Solution

We're trying to save money at the school district that I work at by figuring out a way to mass shutdown PC's at a certain time every night. We discovered that the Deployment Solution has the ability to run a job that shuts down computers at a specified time. It works exactly how we want it except for one thing. The PC's that were shutdown by a user before the scheduled time will process the job the following morning when they are first booted... much to the annoyance of us and the users. Is there any way to set a time out so that if a PC doesn't process the job in X number of minutes that it will simply ignore the job for that evening? Any help on this issue would greatly be appreciated.

Nope. There is really no way around that. The job will just sit there until the computer is active and then will run. NS has the ability to run a job only at a specified time but not DS.

I kind of figured that there wasn't a way to do that but just thought I'd ask. What is NS out of curiosity?

I think that if your Wake on Lan were working, the worst thing would be that it would fire up machines that were down, then just shut them down. I was looking at the selectable conditions for an event, but couldn't find one regarding if the client were active or "powered on". Maybe someone could suggest something else. I tend to run a power shutdown event about 4:30 pm every Friday on lab machines to make sure they are shut down for the weekend. DS 6.9 (build 365).

NS is Notification Server.

Wake-on-LAN doesn't work perfectly in any scenario. We've have been trying for years to get it working properly and even with everything configured correctly it doesn't work 100% of the time. So I wouldn't rely on WOL.

My biggest concern with WOL is that not all of our PC's have that capability turned on. I would have to go to each machine and turn it on in the BIOS. Otherwise, that solution might actually work for me.

I don't remember seeing that in a BIOS setting, but we are a totally HP/Compaq shop using DOS PXE. I have my schools set with two machines per network that stay on and have WOL proxy set for the aclient. It seems to work about 95% of the time.

We do have Compaq Ipaq's as well as Evo 510's. The majority of those do WOL but we have primarily Dell Optiplexes and those have an option in the BIOS if I remember correctly.

All computers made in the last few years will have a WOL option in the BIOS. But even with that set it might or might not work.