Although the FIB applies settings to minimize the energy consumption of personal computers while they are running, the current economic environment demanded going further and finding an effective way to automatically turn them off when they are unintentionally left on during the night. This need led to the development of the “Casimiro” project.
Although the FIB applies settings to minimize the energy consumption of personal computers while they are running, the current economic environment demanded going further and finding an effective way to automatically turn them off when they are unintentionally left on during the night. This need led to the development of the “Casimiro” project.
Casimiro is a system capable of checking if there are users connected to the computer before shutting it down and acting accordingly. Among its most outstanding features are the following:
- Displays a reminder to users logged on to the computer before shutdown
- Notifies users connected to the computer by e-mail before shutting down.
- Allows you to cancel a shutdown through e-mail notification.
- Allows to deactivate the automatic shutdown for one or more nights.
- Centralized configuration management: reminder time, shutdown time, system on/off, etc.
- Logging of system activity: warnings, user responses, cancellations, etc.
To facilitate the disabling of automatic shutdown for users who need their computers to remain on overnight (for example, because they have left a computationally intensive program running that takes hours or days to complete), the system allows this to be done in several ways:
- By clicking on the “No PC Shutdown” icon that is available on the desktop of all computers. By default, this night’s shutdown is deactivated, with the possibility of extending it for 7 days.
- Indicating that you want to keep the computer on when the reminder message appears a few hours before shutdown (the user must be at his PC) or following the personalized link that is sent by e-mail (the user can do this from any device and location, e.g. a mobile phone).
The technologies applied in this project are quite simple:
- On the client side (personal computers) Windows Scheduled Tasks are used to run PowerShell scripts that are configured using XML files using the configuration stored on the server.
- On the server side (Apache), PHP, SQL, and Bash are used for all the application logic and data storage in the database, while HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery are used for the display.