Workstation Management: Maintenance Schedule Update

In the past few years, the maintenance cycles on managed computers has started shortly after all managed libraries were closed (8:15pm). From time to time, some libraries wishing to do programs after-hours were affected by this schedule, and Marmot made accommodations by creating special configurations with altered schedules that we would apply to groups of computers. 

Maintaining multiple update schedules became time consuming, so we have implemented a new automatic maintenance schedule that should consistently fall outside of hours that would impact libraries' services. Instead of maintenance starting at 8:15pm on Tuesday-Wednesday and 7:00pm on Saturday-Sunday, maintenance will now start at 12:15am the following mornings (Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday). 

Details are outlined here: Workstation Maintenance (replacing)

The primary drawback to later maintenance cycles is, of course, power use. It is important for the maintenance cycles to run on a consistent basis and  in such a way that does not impact productivity or services, but this can mean a increased waste in power when schedule flexibility is needed. That said, and idle computer only draws about 70-80 watts of power, at most.