Shut down idle computers on your network automatically (IBM developerWorks)

Interesting article but it mentions Argus without actually saying what it does: turns out it's a real-time monitor for network traffic flows, so the definition of 'inactive' is based on network activity. This could be a problem if the machine was running an antivirus scan, periodic fsck, etc, so it would be better to also enable SNMP agents and check for certain processes via the MIBs available on most OSs, and maybe for CPU usage. This could be added into the centralised monitor approach quite easily, and it has the merit of being agnostic to the type of OS on managed systems.