What Does IT Do to My Mac at Night?
As part of the University Policy of restarting your computer when you leave for the day, here are some instructions of how to accomplish that task: If you are presently using OS9 (all rollout machines are being updated to OSX), here is how you safely restart your machine before you leave in the evening.
Simply go to the "Special" menu and choose "Restart". Be sure to close all your files and programs to assure that your data will not be lost. If there are open files, your computer will probably ask if you want to save them before it restarts.
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If you are already using OSX, here is how you accomplish the same task.
Go to the "Apple" menu and choose Restart." Again, make sure that all your files are saved and closed and applications quit before you restart. |
Macs, as well as PCs, need to have small maintenance updates sent to them to keep them in good working order. These updates are sent to your machine between the hours of 12am and 4am on an as-needed basis. If you turn you machine off, it will not receive the necessary updates it need to maintain normal operation. Unless you restart your machine when you leave, following the above procedures, you cold lose data from any files you left open when the update process remotely restarts your machine.
Here are some examples of the type of updates that will be applied to your machine, after hours:
1. Virus DAT updates. In an effort to keep the campus virus free, we will update you virus definitions remotely, to make sure they are up-to-date.
2. Security updates. Apple makes security updates available to make it harder for hackers to get into our systems. These will be applied at night.
3. System software updates. These are upgrades that enhance the functionality and consistency of the system software. This will apply to OSX users only.
4. Updates to installed, University-supplied software packages. These help with compatibility as well as adding new capabilities to your programs.
It is important to the secure operation of the campus network that these updates be performed. Timely distribution of virus and security updates as well as reducing the costs associated with IT asset management requires that we handle these tasks from a remote location, sometimes, automatically. We are scheduling these tasks at night to be less intrusive for the user.
Jeff Newell
CSUF IT Consultant
5/18/2004
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