Wake On Lan Functionality Across Subnets

Customizations
1

(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)

Hey everyone,

I was wondering how the Bigfix WOL functionality works. Without modifying the settings on the routers between subnets, can I still use the right-click option to send a WOL packet to the destination computer that is on a separate subnet? Currently the routers do not forward normal WOL packets which means that WOL does not work across subnets right now. I’m curious if by using the TEM infrastructure that I can bypass the settings on the router and be able to wake computers separated by routers that do not forward WOL packets. I have set up WOL forwarders, using the fixlet in TEM, on two subnets that I’m testing. The WOL forwarding computers are not the computers being shutdown. I have tried sending a WOL request through TEM to a computer that is shutdown that has a WOL forwarder on the network and the computer does not wake up. Am I missing some setting in TEM that I have to have enabled or can I just not use the TEM infrastructure across subnets?

Thanks,

Ilithis

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Ilithis,

Yes. The wake-on-lan packets are forwarded through BigFix relays to BigFix Agents, which bypasses the need for routers to forward the wol packets.

You might try using the Wake-on-LAN report in web reports to help diagnose setup/configuration issues with Wake-on-LAN.

Ben

3

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Hey Ben,

I looked in web reports and could not find any report in the list that deals with Wake On Lan or Wake On Web that you have referenced others to in the past. Is there someplace that I may download the web report and import it somehow?

Thanks,

4

(imported comment written by Zakkus)

The report Ben is referring to is in our Power Management product, which used to be the only place we offered WoL. We recently pushed a subset of WoL functionality to everyone through the BES Support site, however some advanced functionality (like Wake on Web) you can still only get if you have power management…

There are a few things you might want to check:

-Make sure your endpoints hardware/bios is capable of actually accepting WOL (by default this is turned off on a lot of machines).

-Make sure you dont resend wol requests too quickly. The platform has some optimizations that to minimize network load when waking machines, but this means it wont register a new wakeup to a machine if one has been sent within the last 10 minutes.

-The platform uses the address of the NIC that was used to register to BES when trying to figure out which computer is in which subnet. This means that a computer with multiple NICs will only use one to issues wakes (which can cause confusion).

Also, unless you have a very large subnet, its best to just make every machines a WOL forwarder.

-Zak