Wake all sleeping machines on subnet

remote-accesswake-on-lanwindows 7

Our company just migrated to Windows 7 and decided to use the included "balanced" power plan. The main problem with this is that I use powershell to do remote management and sleeping machines don't respond to these commands. Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can send out a signal to wake up only sleeping machines?

Now, I already know that I can use the "Magic Packet" with wake on LAN, but that has a few problems.

It would wake up every machine on my network up, both S3 and S5.
I have to know what the MAC address of the machine is in order to wake it up.
Not all machines have WoL enabled.

I only want to wake up those systems in the S3 power state, not the S5 power state. (explanation of power states)

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance

Best Answer

So from everything I have gathered, there is not a way to do this. From what I can tell, the magic packet doesn't differentiate between sleep and powered down.

That doesn't mean remote support is impossible. You just have to attack the problem in another direction. The core tool that you have to overcome this limitation is scheduled tasks. When you create a task, there is an option under "conditions" called "Wake the computer to run this task". This will allow you to run a task when the system is in sleep mode. If the computer is off, it will skip over the command and stay off.

Once you have your tasks setup, just setup an automatic statup time that happens before all of your tasks and you will be able to again manage your systems.

I use "schtasks.exe" to add tasks remotely. It allows you to specify a username and password to use for the tasks and you can overwrite them as needed.

It's a complex system to setup, but can save alot of time and power if you have windows 7 machines across the board.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to get ethtool wake-on-lan setting to “stick”

You could use /etc/rc.local or some system boot scripts, but this wouldn't be the best way to do it. On startup your network interfaces are configured, sure, but there are other times when your network interfaces may be brought up or down and you will need this executed during those times.

You want to edit /etc/network/interfaces:

You should have a line like:

iface eth0 inet static

Underneath that, indented further, you want to create a post-up and post-down commands e.g.

iface eth0 inet static
    post-up /usr/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g
    post-down /usr/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g

Obviously, replace eth0 with the relevant interface if different.

See interfaces(5) for more information on post-up and post-down commands

man 5 interfaces

Windows XP Wake-On-Lan problem/question

When powered down to the correct state, name name of which varies from brand to brand of motherboard, not only is the NIC left partially powered on (you'll see the lights blink due to traffic on the network) but the motherboard itself has certain circuitry powered up. That circuitry responds to the signal from the NIC telling it to power back up. Other shutdown modes will prevent one or both those components from being powered up, so the wakeup signal is either not recognised by the NIC or the motherboard doesn't see the signal from the NIC.

As far as "solving" this goes, I have no real ideas. I've also been struggling for years to get it consistently right. Every time I get a new machine I have to start all over. Further, some machines are more cooperative in this regard than others. Some I've had will sometimes wake up but other times won't, even when they've been shut down the same way every time.

My only conclusion is that this is one area the manufacturers need to come to some sort of agreement. They could start with some consistent naming scheme for the various power states.

I better stop there, otherwise people might get the idea this is a pet hate of mine.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to get ethtool wake-on-lan setting to “stick”

Windows XP Wake-On-Lan problem/question

Related Topic