We are lookign at deploying Wake from Standby and trying to wake up the PC about 3 or 4 times during the eveninb 2am, 3am, 5am and 6am). Is the only way to do this to create 4 Wake from Standby fixlets or can this be rolled into one somehow?
Also, has anyone found any native solutions within BigFix to keep the PC alive more than the 2 minutes Windows defaults when there is no action on the keyboard or mouse.
Like others, we are trying to wake up PC for patching purposes.
We are lookign at deploying Wake from Standby and trying to wake up the PC about 3 or 4 times during the eveninb 2am, 3am, 5am and 6am). Is the only way to do this to create 4 Wake from Standby fixlets or can this be rolled into one somehow?
I combined 4 scheduled wakeups by creating each in the wizard and then copying the action script into 1 task. The syntax for StandbyTool.exe is fairly simple. Regardless of whether you create 4 separate tasks or combine them into 1, StandbyTool.exe is going to create 4 scheduled tasks in Windows Task Scheduler.
jr
Also, has anyone found any native solutions within BigFix to keep the PC alive more than the 2 minutes Windows defaults when there is no action on the keyboard or mouse.
Nope. I haven’t found a native way so far in Windows 7, and it definitely can’t be done in Windows XP. This is probably your best option: http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?pid=16610#p16610. I wrote my own service similar to the StayAwake.exe that has a few more features, but essentially serves the same purpose.
You might try using the Execute tab to repeat the action every 60 minutes and set the start and end times around your window. Then one action might do it? I haven’t tried this myself.
I’m the same as Boyd, we wrote our own replacement for the StayAwake service. Magic packets just don’t reset the Idle Timer in Windows XP. My conversations with Microsoft about it led to documentation on how to write our own stawAwake service.
I have deployed 4 tasks (all individual tasks) and they have all showed up in the registry as well as in the Task Scheduler. I have now deployed 2 more items for testing. These lasts 2 tasks show up in the registry as a schedule wakeup under the bigfix client settings but are not showing up in the task scheduler.
Any ideas on why not and my assumption is that they won’t be woken up at a the time specified since they are not in the task scheduler.
If they aren’t in the task scheduler, the machines won’t wake up. To be absolutely sure they weren’t added, try browsing to C:\Windows\Tasks in explorer (or use the command prompt) to see if the .job files are there.
If they really didn’t get added, check that the name of your wakeup task is not using invalid characters. I remember running into problems when using certain characters in the task name (parentheses? dashes? slashes? I can’t remember what it was)
They were basically named the same as the other 4 with a number oat the end. They aren’t in that folder (only the original 4). I have dashes and spaces in the names, but I didn’t suspect this since the other were named the exact same thing.