A few questions on Wake on Lan - PC's and SBS 2003

aamurray

Hi,
A client of mine is running a number of Windows PC's with an SBS 2003 Premium server at the back end. He insists that the PC's are shut down at night to reduce the power consumption. I'm thinking that the boot time in the morning can be significantly reduced if the systems are put into hibernation and waken by a LAN command in the morning.

I understand the principles of setting the client to respond to a WOL command but I have a couple of server questions.

Is it possible to initiate a WOL from the SBS 2003 at a specific time and if so how does one go about it?

Is there a script available to help me to schedule this event?

Cheers,
Al.

Standard Toaster

You could scriptit handy enough. You'll need to pull the mac addresses from the remote pcs first though (WOL requires them as far as I remember)

With that, script sending the 'magic packet' to the machines on port 7

There are plenty of scripts if you google for them be, it perl, powershell, vb etc

aamurray

I'll have a root around at the available scripts and see how it goes.
Thanks for your reply,
al

ressem

There's a free command line version suitable for a batch file and scheduled task available.

In case you're running in an environment that's script unfriendly.

http://www.gammadyne.com/cmdline.htm#wol

Dardania

If you don't want to go the wol route, many BIOS' have a scheduled wake up time opton in them...although the technical challenge of the wol route is more interesting!

aamurray

Thanks everyone and the truth being told - I'm really looking forward taking on the WOL challenge over the next couple of weeks - but the BIOS solution could be just the answer - I will have to weigh up the time and effort required to maintain it on each system as opposed to the single point server management side of the problem.
Cheers,
Alan.

JJJJNR

Not sure this WOL is the best solution for this TBH, you'd be far better off just allowing the PCs to hibernate after an hour of idle time and then get the users to bring them back themselves.

Otherwise you'd have all the pcs coming back on when no ones in the office, the whole point of this green solution is to minimise power consumption, not much point in having every PC in the office buzzing away with no one using them..

aamurray

JJJJNR wrote: »

Not sure this WOL is the best solution for this TBH, you'd be far better off just allowing the PCs to hibernate after an hour of idle time and then get the users to bring them back themselves.

Otherwise you'd have all the pcs coming back on when no ones in the office, the whole point of this green solution is to minimise power consumption, not much point in having every PC in the office buzzing away with no one using them..

I can see your point - in this particular case I would like if the user would initiate hibernation at days end - thus eliminating the "time to hibernate", which is very arbitrary as some users can be away from their desks for more than an hour. The main issue is the start-up time in the morning for which I am aiming to have the systems alive and kicking at 9am.

I am of the opinion that the WOL solution is a bit of challenge but I would really like to get it to work as these type of things get me out of the scene of normal network and server problem solving...

Thank you for your comments.