I run about 300 Macs for a university department. The Macs concerned in this post are first gen Power Mac G5 towers and second gen iMac G5 (no iSight), all running Leopard. When I created my InstaDMG image and packages for Deploystudio last fall I implemented a nightly midnight shutdown. It worked well at first but now it only works about 60% of the time. I had hoped that a “virgin first boot” setup like the one provided by InstaDMG/Deploystudio might clear up things like this. It has helped, things are better than in the NetRestore days, but there are always several Macs in each lab that still won’t cooperate. The problems fall into two categories:
1. Macs that are asleep and won’t wake up to shutdown. I have tried all the usual fixes (zap PRAM, reset NVRAM, repairing permissions and disk, three Hail Mary’s, voodoo dolls) with no joy. A few Macs are persistent while others oren’t. Chaos reigns.
2. Macs on which students have left apps open and files unsaved, resulting in shutdown timeout due to the “Would you like to save before quitting?” dialog being there with nobody to answer it. It seems to me there should be some way to force these apps to quit without saving, and without having to write a script to do it. Am I wrong? I have tried writing a launchd script a few times but even when I have them run by root they don’t execute. Lingon has me frustrated because of this. What is my best solution, oh gods of massed Macs?
The automated shutdown thread elsewhere here doesn’t fit my problem so I decided to start another in the hope that the solution will help someone else in my situation.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
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