Re: Shutdown for dumb users

["Craig Hammond" <Craig@sbisolutions.com.au>]

>From: Aaron Crandall [mailto:acrandal@wgz.com] 
>Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2002 8:40 AM
>To: Craig Hammond
>Cc: misc@openbsd.org
>Subject: Re: Shutdown for dumb users


> 4. Any other suggestions ?  Telling them to leave it powered on all 
> night unfortunately isn't an option..

>  Find a serial port switch that will send a signal to the OBSD system.

>Write a little daemon that listens on the serial port and starts a 
>shutdown if the serial port switch is pressed/flipped.
>
>  --Aaron


Hi,
Thanks for the public and private suggestions so far.

The scenario I gave was just one example of why I want a shutdown
solution.
The are other reasons I would like it that aren't based on the time of
day, so for that reason using cron doesn't really help me.

The ping option wouldn't work in every case either. I have a client who
has nothing but laptops. At any point in time, I don't know how many
laptops or which ones would be connected.

The serial port switch suggestion is the sort of thing I am after as it
can easily be manually initiated at any time. I have no programming
experience in the *nix environment and I no idea where to buy such a
switch, but it give me a good place to start looking.

The best solution is what WinXP already does..Does anyone have any idea
how it does this. Ie. Pressing the power button on an ATX case initiates
a normal shutdown instead of just cutting the power..
Pls don't flame me on this. I'm not trying to say WinXP is better or
anything, it's just a feature I noticed, and the fact that it does it
means that it is possible to do. It then a matter of figuring out how..

Craig...