Lab updates when labs are 24/7

[rstasel]

Hi All,

Have a question about doing lab updates. We have 7 computer labs that are used, to some degree, 24/7. Sure, at 3am there's only one person logged in, but that one person makes it hard to just blanket do something.

So I'm curious if any one has any suggestions. Right now, I've got the machines shutting down (with energy saver) at 10pm (every day), and turning on at 7:30am (weekdays).

I'm trying to think of both an automated way to do updates (both apple, and adobe), and not just run them at logout, which would cause some logouts to take 40-45 minutes if there were a lot of updates to run.

It should be possible to do a reboot at like 10pm if no one is on the machine, then have a policy run and throw up a jamfhelper "lock" screen, but I imagine the case of a student just hopping around to different computers trying to get one that works. =/

But someone must have done this before. So I'm appealing to the greater hive mind on this one. Short of that, I'm stuck just doing updates during breaks... which, kinda sucks. =/

Thanks!

[Look]

I'd say your probably as class as it's likely to get in your thinking, I'd be doing something like.
Use pmset to program a wake or poweron between 1am and 2am.
Have a policy that runs once a day that restarts machines with no one logged in between 1am and 2am.
Have updates apply on startup and restricted to 1am to 2am.
Yes theoretically you could get a student walk in at 1am and have trouble getting a machine as they were all in the process of updating, but at least you wouldn't interefere with any existing users.
If your worried about having no machines available randomise the events across several hours, that way at least some of them would be available at any given time.