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    Taking over IT for a small business

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved IT Discussion
    managementwindows 7windows 10dashrender
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    • JaredBuschJ
      JaredBusch @Dashrender
      last edited by

      @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..

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • IRJI
        IRJ
        last edited by IRJ

        Is windows an actual requirement? Maybe Chrome OS or Ubuntu would work if all they use are web apps

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • IRJI
          IRJ
          last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • IRJI
            IRJ
            last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
            • 1
              1337 @Dashrender
              last edited by

              @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.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • J
                JasGot @Dashrender
                last edited by

                @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.

                JaredBuschJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • JaredBuschJ
                  JaredBusch @JasGot
                  last edited by

                  @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

                  J 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • J
                    JasGot @JaredBusch
                    last edited by

                    @JaredBusch How so?

                    DashrenderD JaredBuschJ 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • DashrenderD
                      Dashrender @JasGot
                      last edited by

                      @JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:

                      @JaredBusch How so?

                      he's lazy. πŸ˜›

                      J 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • J
                        JasGot @Dashrender
                        last edited by JasGot

                        @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
                        
                        
                        DashrenderD 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                        • J
                          JasGot @Dashrender
                          last edited by

                          @Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:

                          he's lazy.

                          Me too. I script everything.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                          • DashrenderD
                            Dashrender @JasGot
                            last edited by

                            @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.log
                            
                            

                            Actually - he would adore you for this. πŸ™‚

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • JaredBuschJ
                              JaredBusch @JasGot
                              last edited by

                              @JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:

                              @JaredBusch How so?

                              Go back and count the steps that you just listed.

                              J DashrenderD 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • J
                                JasGot @JaredBusch
                                last edited by

                                @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.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • DashrenderD
                                  Dashrender @JaredBusch
                                  last edited by

                                  @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.

                                  See what I said - he's lazy πŸ˜‰

                                  J 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • J
                                    JasGot @Dashrender
                                    last edited by

                                    @Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:

                                    See what I said - he's lazy

                                    But I can't hold that against him, I may be lazier than anyone! πŸ™„

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • wrx7mW
                                      wrx7m @JaredBusch
                                      last edited by

                                      @JaredBusch 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?

                                      By having a company policy put in place that they are to be left powered on. Logged off, or locked, yes. But not powered off.

                                      This is my policy. Reboot when you leave. Login when you come back in. Let's just say that only about half of the people do this. For the other half, I have a PDQ deploy schedule for every night at 8 PM, that works with PDQ inventory to reboot client systems that have an uptime of greater than 5 days.

                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                      • scottalanmillerS
                                        scottalanmiller
                                        last edited by

                                        End of day reboots are the best. Machine is up for work, but nothing is logged in and the machines don't stay booted up indefinitely.

                                        wrx7mW DashrenderD 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                        • wrx7mW
                                          wrx7m @scottalanmiller
                                          last edited by

                                          @scottalanmiller said in Taking over IT for a small business:

                                          End of day reboots are the best. Machine is up for work, but nothing is logged in and the machines don't stay booted up indefinitely.

                                          Exactly. Freshen everything up, scans, updates, no open files on the server shares.

                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • DashrenderD
                                            Dashrender @scottalanmiller
                                            last edited by

                                            @scottalanmiller said in Taking over IT for a small business:

                                            End of day reboots are the best. Machine is up for work, but nothing is logged in and the machines don't stay booted up indefinitely.

                                            Yeah, I'm going to look into this as well, if not a daily reboot, definitely a weekly one - for all but my boss, ug.. I just can't ever get her to close her apps when she leaves - it's a constant battle - she (as the boss) just simply refuses to close down at the end of the day - claiming she can jump right in the following day.

                                            I know windows was working on something for that - some way of knowing all things that were open at say 4 PM yesterday, and bring all that stuff back up with a click of a button... I need to look into that for her.. might - might - be a saving grace.

                                            black3dynamiteB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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