At 11:01 AM 10/06/00 +1000, Ludwig Meyerhoff wrote:
>If that were the case, I would like to know if there is a possibility for
a nice >automatic workaround or even a bugfix.
Failure to shut-down reliably is unfortunately very common in Win9X
machines, and a great annoyance (since you can't keep them even remotely
stable unless you re-boot them regularly). My solution was to buy an X-10
ActiveHome kit and 1 3-pin appliance control module per computer (this
amounts to about $50usd for the server and $12usd per workstation in
hardware direct from www.x10.com) to allow the server (running Linux) to
actually power-cycle stuck workstation machines. Now the server in that
office sends out a "shutdown" command to all the workstations at
6:00pm
(using a little systray app started from the RunServices section of the
Windows registry), sorry I cannot recall the name at the moment, but it was
freeware and I suspect that anyone who knows C++ could write you one in
about 3 hours). Then at 6:10, any machines which haven't sent a
"don't shut
me down" signal (the shutdown instruction generates a dialog box with a
timeout on the workstation screen) are hard powered-down through the X-10
system. They all have "scandisk /all /custom" in their autoexec.bat
files
which keeps them mostly happy. It is also a good idea to use a program such
as Winhacker or X-Setup to make sure that the default action for "not
responding" processes is just to (attempt to) kill them rather than to
prompt the user and hang.
For real stability & flexibility, use roving profiles etc. on your Samba
server, make people store ALL their personal files in their personal dir on
the Samba server, and overwrite all the PC's hard drives from a networked
image file at boot time. This more-or-less prevents Windows from becoming
seriously screwed up (although it's a bitch to setup unless you buy your
PCs in bulk. If they're all different then you would probably need a
different image file for each one).
n.b. If security is a concern for you, and you go with an X-10 system,
ensure that you don't install any radio trancievers on the same letter-code
as your computers, and install an X-10 signal filter on your incoming power
supply (to prevent control signals from coming in over the power grid).
Also be sure to see http://heyu.tanj.com for the best X-10 control software
for Linux.
--
Who is this General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?