We are trying a POC regarding BigFix power management and have come across a issue regarding WOL. In our test environment I have two machines on the same subnet and I have designated on machine as the “Wake On Lan Forwarder”. I put the other machine into Standby and have powered off, but have not been able to successfully wake. The NIC\BIOS settings on the target machine are correct as I can wake the machine using another utility.
Has anyone experienced similiar issues and if so, can you let me know what steps were taken to resolve?
If you go to the “Wake from Web” report in the web reports and try to wake up the system, does it tell you any errors?
Also note that the wake-on-lan forwarder has registered before the relay will know to send it WoL messages to forward (it will register by default every 6 hours or you can send it a force refresh).
Also, you should check to make sure all agents/relay/server are 7.1+.
I am working with Jason on the issues that we are seeing.
-When sending the wake thru web reports, it states that wake was successfully sent.
-All the clients\agents\relays are v7.1
I tried the test again this morning and it was successful. Not sure why as we didn’t change anything on the forwarder or the relay, but Jason informed me that there should be a 11 minute wait between tests.
It was likely due to the registration requirement that Ben mentioned. Relays do not know which clients are wake-on-lan forwarders until they enable that setting AND re-register with their relay. Registration occurs once every 6 hours by default, so a wake-on-lan forwarder will generally not be usable immediately after being designated, but rather a few hours later once registration occurs again.
To avoid saturating networks with too many WoL packets, the BigFix Agents will wait between sending WoL packets to the same system… so if you are in the middle of testing WoL and you are putting a computer to sleep and then waking it up with WoL, you might see it work the first time, but then not work for a little while and then start working again… The reason for this is that the agent won’t resend the WoL packets until a delay has elapsed (15 minutes I think).