Taking over IT for a small business
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
Most people do not turn machine off but occasionally(every couple months) I'll use wmic to make sure machines are getting updates somewhat regularly. It shouldnt be critical in any way to miss a few weeks updates but I just make sure someone hasnt gone 3 months or something like that. I have every department in a text file list and I use those a lot for various things.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
If you can't change policy easily then maybe just schedule sometime during lunch and give people a heads up.
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@jmoore said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
If you can't change policy easily then maybe just schedule sometime during lunch and give people a heads up.
This would be much more likely - but lunch is not a set time thing around here. It literally changes daily, based upon a floating schedule, so there would be no way to schedule it over lunch.
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@Pete-S said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
Change the defaults in windows to "sleep" instead of "shutdown".
Send Wake On LAN packet if you need to start it.Remove hibernate unless it's a laptop. Frees up some disk space too.
Also, basically set all machines to go to sleep after X minutes of inactivity. It could be an hour or whatever. Saves on power and if someone forget to turn it "off" (sleep) it will automatically sleep.
2/3's of my fleet is laptops, so yeah.. wake-on-lan is not an option, I'm not sure sleep is even wake-able on a laptop on WiFi?
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Pete-S said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
Change the defaults in windows to "sleep" instead of "shutdown".
Send Wake On LAN packet if you need to start it.Remove hibernate unless it's a laptop. Frees up some disk space too.
Also, basically set all machines to go to sleep after X minutes of inactivity. It could be an hour or whatever. Saves on power and if someone forget to turn it "off" (sleep) it will automatically sleep.
2/3's of my fleet is laptops, so yeah.. wake-on-lan is not an option, I'm not sure sleep is even wake-able on a laptop on WiFi?
WoL is useless unless you have a known on system to send commands from
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@JaredBusch said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Pete-S said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
Change the defaults in windows to "sleep" instead of "shutdown".
Send Wake On LAN packet if you need to start it.Remove hibernate unless it's a laptop. Frees up some disk space too.
Also, basically set all machines to go to sleep after X minutes of inactivity. It could be an hour or whatever. Saves on power and if someone forget to turn it "off" (sleep) it will automatically sleep.
2/3's of my fleet is laptops, so yeah.. wake-on-lan is not an option, I'm not sure sleep is even wake-able on a laptop on WiFi?
WoL is useless unless you have a known on system to send commands from
In my environment it would be a server or my desktop to to never sleep.
In this customer's - from a power POV, I could easily designate a single machine as an always on machine for this purpose - I love using ScreenConnect to send WoL commands to other sleeping machines.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JaredBusch said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Pete-S said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
Change the defaults in windows to "sleep" instead of "shutdown".
Send Wake On LAN packet if you need to start it.Remove hibernate unless it's a laptop. Frees up some disk space too.
Also, basically set all machines to go to sleep after X minutes of inactivity. It could be an hour or whatever. Saves on power and if someone forget to turn it "off" (sleep) it will automatically sleep.
2/3's of my fleet is laptops, so yeah.. wake-on-lan is not an option, I'm not sure sleep is even wake-able on a laptop on WiFi?
WoL is useless unless you have a known on system to send commands from
In my environment it would be a server or my desktop to to never sleep.
In this customer's - from a power POV, I could easily designate a single machine as an always on machine for this purpose - I love using ScreenConnect to send WoL commands to other sleeping machines.
Stop conflating your stuff. The point here is for not your environment, specifically.
I mean yeah, ideas can work both places. but focus please..
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Is windows an actual requirement? Maybe Chrome OS or Ubuntu would work if all they use are web apps
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Even discussing power management on 5-10 desktops is a complete waste for a business IMO. 24/7 for management purposes is the way to go. Just set them to lock
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Also for you guys that do this kind of stuff on a small scale like this, do you create policies for the client? It seems like you could cover alot of these in policies that can be used in a cookie cutter fashion to work with other customers.
Handing a manager or ceo a best practice policy and asking for valid reasons for exceptions is a good way to get a good security posture.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Pete-S said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
Change the defaults in windows to "sleep" instead of "shutdown".
Send Wake On LAN packet if you need to start it.Remove hibernate unless it's a laptop. Frees up some disk space too.
Also, basically set all machines to go to sleep after X minutes of inactivity. It could be an hour or whatever. Saves on power and if someone forget to turn it "off" (sleep) it will automatically sleep.
2/3's of my fleet is laptops, so yeah.. wake-on-lan is not an option, I'm not sure sleep is even wake-able on a laptop on WiFi?
It's called WoWLAN. Windows supports it but I haven't tried it.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
In this customer's - from a power POV, I could easily designate a single machine as an always on machine for this purpose
I always set one or more machines to power on at 10:00pm (bios)
One if they prefer not to leave them on, then I use WoL to power the others up when I need to (updates).All if they don't have a preference and it's a small office.
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@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
In this customer's - from a power POV, I could easily designate a single machine as an always on machine for this purpose
I always set one or more machines to power on at 10:00pm (bios)
One if they prefer not to leave them on, then I use WoL to power the others up when I need to (updates).All if they don't have a preference and it's a small office.
That is a crazy amount of work I don’t wanna do that
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@JaredBusch How so?
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@Dashrender I left this out earlier for fear he would say I was conflating....
Here's our push for power-on for dell PCs, we push it with GPO, or ScreenConnect, or drop it in the startup folder with a script that uses an admin$ share. Most bios mfrs have a utility for editing bios remotely.
It sets it up the way we want, and if someone changes it, it auto re-applies at the next boot.
\\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoon=everyday --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonhr=22 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonmn=0 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log -
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@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender I left this out earlier for fear he would say I was conflating....
Here's our push for power-on for dell PCs, we push it with GPO, or ScreenConnect, or drop it in the startup folder with a script that uses an admin$ share. Most bios mfrs have a utility for editing bios remotely.
It sets it up the way we want, and if someone changes it, it auto re-applies at the next boot.
\\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoon=everyday --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonhr=22 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonmn=0 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.logActually - he would adore you for this.
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@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JaredBusch How so?
Go back and count the steps that you just listed.
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@JaredBusch said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JaredBusch How so?
Go back and count the steps that you just listed.
It's two clicks from SC, and since we only work in domain environments, we import the GPO as part of our on-boarding. Since we script everything, and our next customer is not our first customer, the workload to accomplish the auto power on task as described here is undetectable.
