Re: is anyone getting energy savings on PCs using WOL or the like

["Brian K. Doré" <bkd () LOUISIANA EDU>]

We use the BIOS settings to turn machines on weekday mornings before work.  Major vendors (most of ours are Dell 
Optiplex) have software that can be used to set or change these through scripting.  Patches, AV definitions, etc. are 
configured to run at startup.    For most machines we also schedule the machine to shutdown after a couple of hours of 
inactivity.  From the user's perspective, the machine is ready to log in when they arrive, and they don't have to worry 
about shutting it off when they leave.   Shutting down a machine about 12 hours a day gives about $50 of savings per 
year, depending on your electrical cost.  It certainly adds up with lots of machines.   You do have to be careful on a 
per-machine basis because if a critical machine isn't available during work hours, the $50 electrical savings could 
easily get wiped out in a single lost productivity incident.  Because of this we exempt a lot of machines from this 
policy because of user/application requirements.   We also use EZ GPO from the US EPA to set sleep mode/monitor 
blanking on machines.  This has been problematic because suspend/resume can be affected by so many things (USB devices 
for example.)

Brian

Brian Dore'
Systems Administrator
University of Louisiana at Lafayette





-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of David 
Grisham
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 11:09 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: is anyone getting energy savings on PCs using WOL or the like

As a corporate component of our university we traditionally applied patches and updates during the night to our PCs.  
This way our clinics and floors did not see interruptions to their workstations during business hours.  We would like 
to go green and turn off these workstations when possible.

We would like to start letting our staff turn off workstations & wake them a couple hours before business and apply 
necessary maintenance.  Does anybody have a tool for this process that is understood by the workstation to be 
authorized and not a network probe that we would be blocking with network tools (e.g. blocking Smurf)?

Cheers.-grish
David Grisham, Manager ITSecurity, UNMH