maintenance

If the machines are Turned OFF then you can't do it - assuming you are trying ot do maintenance on workstations - then teach users to logout, but not to turn the machines off - easist way to convince them is to tell them that you are auto updating the virus protection overnight.

You then need some sort of scheduler on your server to run the necessarry batch files to do the maintence. What is available depends on your OS Unix has cron, For NT use the AT command to schedule batch file, or most good network verions of a virus protecters (VET, Symantec) have a system that allows you to schedule virus updates - with a little work you can use this for all sorts of other things.

Another answer is to use Wake-on-Lan network cards. These have become quite reasonable in price and can be installed in most computers with an ATX power supply. When you need to wake up the computer to do maintenance, there is a command you send and it turns on and boots up the computer.

I recently purchased a $15 clone NIC card that had this functionality so it needn't be expensive.

paul

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