As a budget cutback, our school administrators asked us to shutdown all non-essential classroom computers at night to save electricity. I teach Linux in a classroom that has a Dell Poweredge 2850 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL5) server and 29 Dell Optiplex 745 student lab computers running Microsoft Windows XP SP3 as the host operating system and VMWare Server to provide virtual Linux machines for our classes. I researched on the Internet for the best solution to remotely shutdown the student lab computers at night. I was not able to find one post or how-to that completely answered my questions, but I was able to piece together a solution. In an effort to document this project and help others with similar needs, here are my notes on the project. Read more