Wake-on-LAN issues

(imported topic written by mvm-upenn91)

We’re having some issues with testing Wake-on-LAN functionality, and hopefully we can get some info to straighten them out. The major symptom is that machines just aren’t waking up most of the time. For our testing, the machines we’re working on are all on the same subnet, and there are ~50 machines, most or all of which have been set to be WOL forwarders. The computers are a mix of Windows and OS X machines, with the Windows machines being mostly XP or 7 with a few Vista machines thrown in.

Sometimes, when I send a WOL request–either through Wake on Web (which responds “Can receive wake up requests”) or through right-click “Send Wake on LAN Request” in the console, a given computer actually wakes up, but most of the time it just doesn’t respond. When it does, it’s nearly immediate. The computers I’m trying to wake up, generally from off, definitely have Remote Wakeup turned on and deep sleep turned off in the BIOS. I really can’t see any pattern to when and why computers do or don’t wake up, and I’ve had one-time success with certain computers that then haven’t been successfully woken up since.

Further weirdness is that when I try using the Wake-on-LAN Scheduling Wizard, I see the subnet in question listed as “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - (50 computers),” but when I hit “Next” to the Select Computer screen, there is ONE computer listed no matter which time depth I choose, and there are definitely many more computers that are asleep or off and haven’t checked in in 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

So, really, any troubleshooting suggestions are welcome, because I’m hitting dead ends all over. Thanks!

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi mvm-upenn,

The right-click WoL works differently than the scheduling wizard WoL so those issues seem different.

In general, the way to tackle the trouble-shooting (for right-click WoL) is:

  • Double-check that you have it configured properly with WoL forwarders set-up (sounds like you did because wake-from-web didn’t complain).
  • Make sure your computers are able to properly receive UDP messages. The easy way to do this is to send a right-click refresh to a computer on one of these subnets and make sure you see “Force refresh received” in the logs. (you might also double-check to make sure wake-on-lan initialization didn’t fail: http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=1488)
  • Make sure the computers are set to be able to wake-up. You might try a test putting one in standby and seeing if it can wakeup (http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=2707). Note that you need to wait a bit (10 minutes I think) between waking up the same computer due to built-in WoL rate limiters in the agents.

You might try working with the support team to figure this out.

Ben