In enterprise networks, idle desktop machines rarely sleep, because users (and

IT departments) want them to be always accessible. While a number of solutions

have been proposed, few have been evaluated via real deployments. We have built

and deployed a sleep proxy system at Microsoft Research. Our system has been

operational for six months, and has over 50 active users. To the best of our

knowledge, this paper is the first to report on lessons learned from building,

deploying and running a sleep proxy system on a real network. Overall, we find

that our system allowed user machines to sleep quite well (most sleeping over

50\% of the time), but much potential sleep time was missed due to IT management

tasks that play havoc with machine sleep. We suggest a number of ways to fix

this problem. We also discover and address a number of issues overlooked by

prior work, including complications caused by IPsec. We found certain popular

cloud-based applications did not work well with our design, and we deployed an

ad-hoc fix to the problem. We believe our experience and insights will prove

useful in guiding the design of future sleep solutions for enterprise networks.

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