Re: [Thinstation-general] USB Mount oddity

[Jason M. <Jas...@mv...>]

Mike Eriksen wrote:
> On 10/19/06, Graeme.Lockett <Gra...@wg...> wrote:
> 
>>Hi Kevin,
>>
>>The drive redirect works well; I don't know why I didn't do this in the
>>first place. I have removed Samba and improved the PXE boot time! Now
>>all I need is a nice way to shut them down at night!
> 
> 
> Edit the crontab?
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> 
>>
>>Graeme Lockett

Please see one of my postings earlier this year.

Thanks
Jason_Meers


Hi all,

a while ago I mentioned the need to reduce the amount of energy used by 
our thinstations and the air conditioning.

After a bit of research I found that once you know how much energy a 
thinstation is using you can add another 33% on top of that for the cost 
of the air conditioning to disapate the resulting heat from the terminal.

In my environment we use Windows Server 2003 with mostly Terminal 
Services and a small number of Citrix clients. Terminal services and 
Citrix both handle a disconnection gracefully (by that I mean you don't 
have to repair anything to be able re-connect again), because of this 
the thinstation can just be forcibly turned off without the need for any 
fancy scripts or a staged shutdown procedure.

Once you have disconnected sessions you can use the server-side settings 
and shutdown tools to dictate how long to keep the disconnected session 
alive for or when to log off the user.

I intend to turn off every client just after 10pm each night, but for 
testing I wanted to see some results quickly. The following changes will 
allow you to build a test cd to try this for yourself on a single pc (I 
recommend you just boot a single machine from a cd-rom iso before doing 
anything drastic on your network)

As always I've looked for a simple solution (as the fancy stuff tends to 
break everything else around it).

edit the following file ./packages/base/etc/init.d/crond from about line 
9 to read:

---- snip ----

     crond
     echo "00,20,40 * * * * /bin/poweroff" >> /tmp/crontab
     echo "0  * * * * /bin/checklogs" >> /tmp/crontab
     crontab /tmp/crontab

---- snip ----

Now re-build the images and burn the ./boot-images/iso/thinstation.iso 
to a cd-rom (all covered in the how-to's). Then boot from the test CD 
and wait until 00, 20 or 40 minutes past the hour to see them poweroff
(Obviously this is only useful for testing not live use).

Once you have it working try a realistic shutdown schedule such as:

     echo "30 22 * * * /bin/poweroff" >> /tmp/crontab

which would only do the shutdown at 22:30 pm each day

---

A more detailed explanation of the crontab format can be found at:
http://www.linuxhelp.net/guides/cron/

If anyone knows an easy way to make TS give an audible "beep" we could 
give a warning a few minutes before power off (I don't expect anybody to 
be sat at the terminal at 10:30 and they could always just turn it on 
again to reconnect the session if working late).

If any of you try this please send your feedback back to the list.

Miles, could we look at this facility again once the 2.2 series has gone 
final and we have some more end-user feedback.

Thanks
Jason Meers