Is there a way of making all the computers in our domain/environment go to sleep after say, 8PM and wake up at 7AM in the morning?
I understand that this may need some sort of application for the server to communicate with but I believe this will not be so difficult with SCE and due to the fact that we only have about 10 PCs in the office.
Best Answer
The particular details depend on the OS they are running but the basics are the same -- and simple.
shutdown -- a scheduled task is run on each machine at the appropriate time that calls the shutdown command for a clean halt. Use job scheduler or cron, whichever is the one you have.
wake up -- all machines will have to support Wake on LAN (WOL) and have it enabled. One machine has to stay up to send the WOL packets to the others at the appropriate time. The waker machine executes a scheduled task to do this. Note that currently WOL only works for wired networks.
There are several places on the net where you can get a WOL utility. It's fairly simple to write one yourself.