Scheduled Computer Power-ON

[Dale Goodell]

Greetings:

Has anyone developed a system for scheduling daily power-ups for their Library's public computers? We would like to have a scenario where our machines would be scheduled to power on automatically Monday-Friday at 7:15 am, Saturday at 9:45 am and Sunday at 11:45 am.  We have 75 public machines to bring up each day; having such a system would be a great help for staff and students opening the building.

We currently use Deep Freeze to schedule nightly shut-downs for the equipment, and that seems to work fairly well.  We may also consider using Ghost for the power-up scheme as well, as we're already using it to deploy our images.  We haven't experimented with Ghost's power-up capabilities yet, as we would need to coordinate this with our campus University Computing Services staff. 

We have also played with a program called PowerOFF, that has similar power-up/down capabilities. The drawback with here is that it appears we can only schedule a power-on for one machine.

What solutions have others implemented?  I have one of our student employees working on this project and he has started playing with a program called RSHUT Pro; anyone have experience with this?  Or has anyone successfully used PowerOFF to schedule power-ups for several machines?

Any other recommendations would be much appreciated.

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Dale E. Goodell
Information Technology Consultant
Hamersly Library -- Western Oregon University
345 N. Monmouth Avenue
Monmouth, OR 97361

Voice:   503-838-8891
Fax:     503-838-8399
E-mail:  goodeld at wou.edu
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