Surveyor PC Power Management 7 - Issues

Issue:

Problems and fixes using Verdiem Surveyor software.

Quick:

Prevent shutdown during backup- SmartProfile idletime manager ", Autocad prevented shutdown - "Power State Transition Rules", profile updates did not happen on short wait periods - use longer wait times.

Visual/Learning:

There were not many issues. For the most part the software worked as expected. I knew that I might have issues with machines trying to power down part way into a nightly backup. To prevent this I discovered that the newest version of Surveyor (5.0.0.274) has an option to check for disk activity.

Under the SmartProfile Scheme on the "Sruveyor Idletime Manager" You can set a threshold for idle time. During the backup, the disk usage and network activity is high, so the workstation does not suspend. Once the backup is done and the disk usage drops, the workstation goes back into suspend.

Another issue was with Autocad. Autocad puts up a warning box that prevents suspend if there is an open and unsaved drawing on a network share. Company policy is that all drawing should be saved and closed out before leaving work, but not everyone is good about doing it. Surveyor has a feature that allowed me to kill the acad application before going into suspend. Right click on Surveyor and select "Power State Transition Rules...".I created a rule called Kill AutoCAD and had it look for the acad.exe program. I set the action to "Terminate Application" and now all the systems shutdown.

Other choices for Action: on this page are:

The only other issue was that clients did not always update the new profile right away. Verdiem's seems to try to limit the network traffic as much as possible but in some cases the software did not update before it was time to shutdown.

For example, I first set the computers to suspend after 5 minutes at night. In the morning the schedule should change to always on, but people would come in, turn on their computers and after 5 minutes they would suspend again. Five minutes was apparently not enough time for the client to get the profile updates from the server. I changed the night profile to suspend after 15 minutes and everything works fine.

As I said everything seems to work pretty well though Verdiem may have gone a bit overboard on keeping network traffic low. Also someway to script commands to the server would be nice but apparently they do not exist as of September 2008.

Surveyor PC Power Management 8