We have pushed a power profile out on all our desktops to turn off the monitor after 20min. and enter standby after 1 hour (pretty standard). The issue I am having is that we have not always been able to bring the systems out of standby remotely (via RDP). I have pushed the “Enable Wake-from-Standby by Magic Packet - Windows XP” action but this by default allows the system to turn off the NIC which is causing a subsequent issue with some of the PC’s not being able to find the Domain on their first logon attempt (according to one of our network engineers). I have searched through MS documentation on the various reg settings that correspond with these power management settings for the NIC and it appears to me that the only way to allow the NIC to bring the system out of standby is by allowing the system to also be able to turn off the NIC, which seems like a cruel trade-off. Is this true or has anyone found a more elegant solution to my problem? If you need more info or better clarification just let me know.
Can you tell us the exact names of the settings you were referring to? And are you trying to use RDP to wake up the computer OR use WoL packets to wake up the computer?
We are using WOL when waking up systems for patching and this works fairly well. The main problem is when users are working remotely from our CITRIX server and they RDP from there to their workstations to use programs installed there. They are having issues with the systems not coming out of standby when attempting to connect via RDP. I have attached a pic of the settings that BigFix alters when you push out “Enable Wake-from-Standby by Magic Packet - Windows XP”, which I was assuming was the solution to not being able to bring the systems out of standby using RDP. This then creates an issue of the network cards being able to be turned off by the OS which would be the main issue now. I think this is probably more a Microsoft issue then BF at this point but I didn’t know if other people were running into the same solution with power management. I deally the solution would be to enabled power management on the systems (whic has been done via BF), allow the systems to be brought out of standby via RDP, and achieve this without the NIC being allowed to be turned off by the OS.
If you check the second option “Allow the computer to be brought out of standby” AND the third option “Only allow management stations to bring the computer out of standby”, then WoL will work when the computer is in standby. RDP will NOT bring the computer out of standby. BigFix Fixlet will check both these options.
If you only check the second and not the third option, then ANY directed packet will wake up the computer (including RDP, ping, other TCP/UDP packets). This might solve your issue and allow RDP to wake up the system, but you might find that the computer wakes up for lots of other reasons for other types of network traffic.
Sounds like a plan, thanks Ben! I will try this the first chance I get. Luckily there is only a dozen or so systems that fall into the group having this issue so I can change those manually. I will also check the corresponding registry values for this configuration so I can perhaps make a custom copy of the fixlet to enable just those checks. I don’t remember the exact numbers of the top of my head but I think it changes to reg value to something like “122” and changing that to something like “53” or “136” represents which power options on the NIC are checked or not. Does that sound familiar to anyone? If so, do you know the correct value to set the reg at to only check the second and not the third option?
One last issue would be that when I set this configuration manually it then grays-out the options so I will not know if this works until I test it . . . ? (See attached)
I think you need to check the first and second option and leave the third unchecked… You can check the boxes and then check to see what the reg key values end up with and then use that number in your Fixlet.