FCO owns up to energy waste The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been leaving about 10,000 computers switched on overnight. In response to a parliamentary question from shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth, minister Meg Munn said that on the assumption that each computer uses 80 watts of power and is left on for 14 idle hours each day, the …
So, to summarise; a government department is accused of leaving some computers on overnight, which costs a lot. They say they need to leave them on, and besides, they're replacing them and introducing low-power usage policies which should all be complete by 2009. All's well that ends well.
Non story, shirley?
HM Revenue and Customs do this as well.
My girlfriend works for them, and tells me that she , and eveyone else are told to leave the computers on constantly for "updates". This is in many offices up and down the country amounting to thousands of machines.
The IT is outsourced to Fujitsu.
I've been meaning to try to get some proof /extent by writing to the it department to discuss it so i could embarrass them in public, maybe here, but i assumed it'd come to nothing.
This however seems the ideal time to mention it!
The security issue is when the user has forgotten their password (for some reason users forget their passwords easier when machines have been turned off) and need to reset it (repeatedly)
And the productivity issue is phoning their support guys to reset it or to ask where the 'on' button is.
A second call may be required to turn on the monitor too.
It's as bad when you watch some live interview from the BBC newsrooms at early o'clock in the morning to see all of their machines happily chugging away, doing nothing, swallowing up licence payers cash.
Auto-standby? Wake for updates (or remote or whatever)? Switch the monitor off? It's not difficult.
And as for updates...what? You mean those things that reboot machine without user consent? They're just great they are. First thing I disable on ALL Windows boxes is bloody auto-updates (manual download, manual install). For most desktop systems, denying the auto-reboot should be enough.
If users are too dumb to remember their passwords, this is for one of two reasons
1) They are genuinely thick.
2) The password system in place is too complex (they'll start writing the passwords down; big risk)
And you're going to have the same problem with auto-updates switched on, when the machine reboots itself. Hey....here's a stunning idea. Why not just update when the machine is ON? the user can reboot when they nick out for lunch, or the next morning when the switch it back on again.
OR, radical idea, ditch Windows and get a proper OS.
There are just so many solutions it is almost unreal.
This really is the most pathetic excuse for waste I have heard, since the last pathetic gubermint excuse. "Do as we say, not as we do!"
Here's an idea. If the power saving is that important, how about putting the 10,000 users on shift work. Three shift working. That way you'd need only a third of the machines, and, hey, a third of the work space. So savings on buildings, rental, heating as well.
Now, what can we do about the weekends?
... of maximum power draw. Given the theme of modern PCs I have no faith that maximum power draw won't be silly high (remember, max and not typical here).
Turn the damned things off, and hit the light switch on the way out too. Unless you're scared there'll be a sprained finger due to turning the lights off. Terrible H&S risk that.
Universities ain't much better either.
Dunno why your gf is getting told this, I know for a fact their Radia desktop management infrastructure can trickle down updates, and even rebuild the box, from standby!
To be honest though this is a management issue for all companies with more than a hundred or so users, so I'm not sure exactly how big - or unique - a story this really is?
one admission here seems (IMHO) to be that they cannot trust MS power management; historically this hasn't always been the sharpest tool of the microsoft box, and 5 years back I could have understood it. but since W2k came out, and XP more so power management does seem to have come on somewhat. I wouldn't exactly condone using it on a server, but for standard machines surely a domain policy that kills screens after 10 minutes (lcd's now so lets forget screen'savers' and not allow users to install the latest 'Its a screensaver, not a virus.scr.exe') and suspends/hibernates the PC after 45 minutes.
Patching isn't an excuse. every attempt I've ever seen at patching doesn't pass 90% deployment due to issues with everything else that can go wrong.
if it's neither of the above, then perhaps their build is just flaky. government builds seem to have no single authority on software to be allowed/included. so they often end up with the cheapest applications due to 'value for money' concerns, that turn out to be completely inoperable with everything else on the PC. I've seen pretty decent laptops arrive and be decimated by installing a bunch of poorly integrated applications into a lumpering 286 impression (I'm not joking).
the current obsession with looking at the pennies on budgets often means we miss the pounds flying overhead.
if only there was an alternative to these closed source operating systems that could be implemented...oh, hang about.
The issue I have with power saving, is the number of corporate CRM, database and accounts applications that have absolutely no support for it. The PC going into low power consumption mode usually has the same effect on the application that pulling the power plug out of the PC would have, i.e. locked records, corrupted database and a Sage file that needs sending back to Sage PLC for repair.Until the vendors support the application going into "files open but safe for power down mode", I'll keep disabling power saving on every machine on my sites :)
You disable automatic updates in an enterprise environment? You either have users that are much more attentive and technically minded then I ever have, or you have an office full of security vulnerabilities. I would guess a third possibility is that you have never been responsible for an enterprise deployment, and you're talking about a few home machines. Yes, that seems more likely.
It's utterly and completely trivial to design a scheme that's much better on the energy usage then "leave your computers on all night", and yet better vulnerability management then patching manually. WOL can (but doesn't have to) be part of this, but it's not three magic letters. Having overseen multiple enterprise wide rollouts of this, the biggest issues are enabling AND properly configuring directed broadcasts on each subnet, and changing BIOS settings to support WOL.
The first is primarily an issue because the type of people who build and maintain large networks aren't the type to make global changes on a whim, especially one that allows broadcast traffic to cross subnets. Also, depending on the size of the network and the centralized management options in place, this could mean hours or even days of work for them. Once you can get them to settle down and listen to the proposal (for some reason, they hear "broadcast" and tune out the directed part, as well as the "from specific machines" part), they generally get on board and use this as a point for deploying a centralized management solution, if they don't have one.
The BIOS Settings change is actually the harder one. Often, these setting are turned off in large environments, and depending on the age, make, and model of the hardware, may require upgrades, jumper changes, or other items. I oversaw one deployment where approximately 1000 machines needed a single wire connected. The time needed for this varies drastically based on specific machines in question and how much travel time the tech has, but for 10,000 machines in multiple small offices, 15 minutes per machine is not unreasonable. Travel time, introducing yourself, getting the user to log off, making the change, and moving to the next one. That works out to about 2500 man hours. This item right here is why many organizations choose to implement this feature on new machines.
Or, if you have the hardware to support it, it can be a simple SMS/Altaris/Unicenter SDO/etc job that changes the entire environment in a night.
Other solutions exist- Schedule wake ups, both with and without centralized management components. Intelligently designed power management profiles and patch management schedules. In an environment where no one leaves more than a few minutes early, and no one stays more than a few minutes late, you can get away with some very cheap to implement solutions.
I don't mean to imply that this is by any means hard- Any competent sysadmin type should be able to run the project. But it does require stuff like sitting down and thinking about it, actually knowing what the requirements are, and scheduling resources to be available.
Ditching windows and getting a proper OS would be great. I hate dealing with CALs. The cost of the OS itself often pales in comparison with the CAL price, especially when you start looking to upgrade say, your email server. If only one existed that wouldn't require sending 10,000 users to a training course to use...
(Note that's more a slam on corporate users then whatever OSS solution you prefer. These are the same corporate users that require a training class for PowerPoint. Further, their helpdesk/sysadmins can't even handle the relatively simple deployment of Power Management, how are they going to roll out Ubuntu, much less support it? Not that you'd care, as you're advocating a OS Change for enabling WOL, which is primarily a BIOS and Infrastructure level change...)
With all data and apps on big iron hidden down in the basement?
Now, I'm a veteran user of IBM 3270 based systems, so let me add that a brain-dead (by modern standards) text-only system is not what I have in mind.
Is it really necessary to have tens of thousands of PCs each loaded with apps and data?
Maybe I'm simply out of touch with modern IT, but it sure smells to me like there's a very good business opportunity lurking in here somewhere.
Maybe I'm being as stupid as Paris pretends to be.
You telling me you do not 9at least) disable the ability of AutoUpdate to force a reboot? My; your users must love you!
FWIW all my machine are up-to-date, and they update when I decide they update. When it is appropriate to what I am doing. Not when some wonk at M$ presses the red button.
No, of course not. When you are dealing with large organizations, you don't have that luxury. Imagine get 10-30 thousand user to manually run updates. Some of these people are the same people who call the helpdesk and say "My internet isn't working" if they mistype a URL. Generally speaking, they aren't stupid, it's just that their strengths are in different areas. I'm not an expert on EEO Law, why would I expect the HR Department to have an understanding about Vulnerability Management?
The Auto Update service reboots after installing any patches which need it. Absent shift work (One of those items that you have to sit down and think about), I generally set the Auto Update function to install those patches at 3AM. Very few users (again, discounting the night shift, which you identify and give a different policy to during the planning phase) complain about their machines rebooting at 3.30ish in the morning. Other edge cases are handled in a similiar manner.
and tell you if they needed everyone to leave their PCs on for an update. This didn't happen very often. Otherwise we were under strict instructions to power down before going home. Basically, they couldn't make Wake On LAN work, even when they were able to get up-to-date hardware with XP Pro rolled out to everyone.
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