Power saving shutdown for Server

[Ian Moore]

Hello,

Does anybody have any ideas for an easy way for client users to 'powerdown' their Edubuntu server ?

This is not a problem, more of a refinement in user friendliness.

We turn our server off every night to save power. In order to do this the last of our office staff to leave the building
shuts down their client machine and then log on as using the admin acount with root privaledges. They then bring up a terminal and type in 'sudo shutdown'.

Whilst this is Ok it would be nice if they could do this when they are logged in as clients.

I know you can 'ssh' in remotely but the two problems are

  1. I dont really want people to be using the root password
  2. Nearly all of the users are not familiar with the terminal and quite understandably dont want to learn.

I have tried running a Cron job to shutdown the server at 11pm each night. However for some reason I can't get it to work.
The path is correct and the job is executed as root but it doesn't seem to work.
I've even tried creating a job using Webmin. This works when you run the script from the menu screen. But when left to run as scheduled it doesn't work.


 Thanks

 Ian Moore
 IT at Birmingham Friends of the Earth (UK)

p.s for some reason a lot of my posts seem to be missing carriage returns?
I'm using fsmail web based email.