Scheduled Shutdown / Wakeups

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1

(imported topic written by larrykavanagh91)

Hi,(forgive if I posted to incorrect section)

Evaluating BigFix and in particular the power management module. I would like to schedule a shutdown at 7:00pm every day and perform a WOL on Sat at 11am so I can perform virus scans.

I can’t see how to do this.

thanks in advance

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Larry,

Well… you can use the “Power off Computers” Task in the BigFix Power Management site to schedule times to shut-off computers (use the scheduling and reapply behaviors). Then you can use the “Wake-on-LAN Scheduling Wizard” to schedule wake-up times…

But I personally like this solution better:

  • Instead of powering down, set the system to go into standby after 60 minutes of inactivity (using the “Power Profile Wizard”).
  • Instead of using scheduled wake-on-LAN (which would work in this scenario as well), use the “Wake-from-Standby Scheduling Wizard” to schedule the wake-up.

This approach is easier to manage and you don’t have to deal with nasty wake-on-lan issues with system BIOS settings and system WOL support, it saves users from worrying about losing work with power-off nightly, and it is much faster to wake-up a system and return to work than it is to boot up a system from power-off.

Ben

3

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Additional note:

You also need to make sure that the WoL is enabled in the BIOS (in addition to the NIC). Each manufacturer does this differently…

Also, in terms of comparing power used by a powered-off computer and a computer in standby:

Older computers use more energy when they are in standby… the default values that we use in Power Management have a full-power computer using 58 watts and a computer in standby using 28 watts… However, for computers built in the last couple years, they tend to be very efficient with their low-power states and often use only 1-2 watts when in standby (which is very similar to powered-off because a computer still draws a little bit of power in powered-off mode).

The simplest way to check is to take one of your PCs, get a simple power meter (BigFix Sales Engineers carry them around and we used to ship them to prospective customers) and see the power used when the system is powered on and when the system is in standby.

Ben

4

(imported comment written by larrykavanagh91)

sorry for bothering you but I can’t get WOL working … it’s driving me

mad … either it doesn’t work too well or I’m missing some steps.

In the end I might go with your suggestion to put pc’s to standby and

awaken from there (actaually have some probs with that too but that’s

for another day) but I’d like the WOL option as well.

These are newish pcs … they are XP SP3 … I’ve looked in Bios and NIC

they have WOL enabled (as far as I can see).

I’ve designated a WOL forwarder in same subnet but even from console if

I try to wake up a pc with right-click it doesn’t work.

can you advise

Cheers

Larry

5

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Larry,

There is a web report “Wake On Web” that will let you try to wake-up a computer the same way that the Console “right-click wake-on-lan” works, except that it will also check some common error conditions (like if the agents aren’t the right version, there are no wake-on-lan forwarders, etc.).

See if that helps…

If it continues to not work, you can try this test that should skip all of the BigFix infrastructure:

  1. Download http://software.bigfix.com/download/bes/misc/bes-wol.zip

  2. Run bes-wol.exe on a computer in the same subnet as the target computer.

  3. This tool will generate the magic packet and send it directly to the target computer. If that doesn’t work, it strongly indicates that your systems won’t support WoL (you can try another WoL tool online if you want, but they should all generate the same magic packet).

Ben