scheduling system maintenance

[y4h00]

i run a small cyber cafe and it has become a nightmare to maintain all the computers! i need to schedule system maintenance tasks everyday for different things and it has become a very ugly chore. do you guys also suffer the same? any ideas/solutions?

[mmarable]

What sort of maintenance are you doing? There are several solutions that will do regularly scheduled maintenance, but it all depends on what you want to accomplish.

In a nutshell, you could write a script that does everything you're looking to do and schedule a task within Windows to execute it every night. You can probably set your machines to automatically power themselves on at a specific time, so even if they're powered off you can still update them. If not, there are several command-line Wake On LAN (WOL) tools that you can run from a central "server" that will wake each machine up if it's power down.

If you're looking a quite a lot of machines, then you could always go with SMS.

So, how many machines are you talking about and what exactly to you want to accomplish with them?

[Zxian]

Another option is to use a program like Faronics Deep Freeze. It'll completely restore the computers to a "base" stat at every reboot. When you need to change something, reboot the computer in a "thawed" state, make your changes, and then reboot in the "frozen" state again. Those changes will then stick after that.

You'll never have to worry about viruses or spyware ever again either! Get infected? Just reboot.

[WolfX2]

Another option is to use a program like Faronics Deep Freeze. It'll completely restore the computers to a "base" stat at every reboot. When you need to change something, reboot the computer in a "thawed" state, make your changes, and then reboot in the "frozen" state again. Those changes will then stick after that.

You'll never have to worry about viruses or spyware ever again either! Get infected? Just reboot.

NOW THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT! Its the best solution to computer maintenance and the jerk-off's who think its funny to change the font to the same color as the background. Edited June 19, 2006 by WolfX2

[Zxian]

Yeah - I'm the "computer administrator" for my student society, and we've got 5 computers that everyone uses. When I got there, 4 computers were running Windows and 1 was our Linux server. The previous comp admin was a total Linux junkie, and didn't really care about the Windows boxes. I took one look at them and reformatted and put Deep Freeze on there. Faronics actually offers co-op jobs to us students (they're a local Vancouver company), so we got a special deal through our co-op contact.

Just a note if you do this - disable all auto-update services. They'll just pop up with annoying messages every time someone uses the computer.

[y4h00]

Thanks for the help, mmarable. That was very informative.

Zxian: somehow i seem to have caught the bait on your idea. It looks really good - in an evil sort of way!

thanks for the info. Could you tell me a couple of things about this:

#1. when the system is restored on reboot - does it take care of issues like defragmentation etc.

#2. does it allow for users to save some files somewhere (on a different drive, maybe)

#3. what are the space requirements for such a system? i guess it would mean a complete copy of the exisiting system is saved somewhere.. no?

#4. WOW!! D4MN THIS IDEA SOUNDS GOOD!

PS: seeing automatic censor for (D 4 M N) the first time here!

[Zxian]

1) I'm not sure about defragmentation, but the computers that I've set up haven't been suffering any performance loss since the beginning. The average startup time for apps is the same now as it was 6 months ago.

2) Yes. You can create a second partition that is not "frozen", meaning that the disk contents will remain as they are upon reboot. Alternatively, you can create a "thawspace" on the drive, which will be mapped to a second drive. I personally prefer the former, and then mount the partition into the My Documents folder. That way, when everyone saves things, it's to My Documents as usual. On the 20GB hard drives that we've got, 15GB is for the system and applications (we've got some big analysis apps - Matlab for example), and 5GB for user saves.

3) The actual installer is only about 25MB, and I think the installed files are about the same. You definately don't have to make a mirror of the drives or anything like that. Just for the record - this is not a ghosting image. The bootup time is no slower than normal, and you really don't notice the difference in performance. When you configure the installer (you basically build your installer for your system), you can select to remove the tray icon, so that users don't even know it's there.

4) Yeah - it's a pretty wicked app. You should download the trial from the DeepFreeze homepage and give it a whirl. At $27.30 per licence for 10, you can't go wrong compared to "traditional" security and maintenance software.

btw - try not to circumvent the swear filter next time. It's there for a reason.

[y4h00]

absolutely chilling cool, zxian. lemme give this a shot!

and yeah, i'll try not to circumvent the s*ear filter next time