Wake on Lan (WOL) Best Practices?

(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)

Can anyone describe the their best practices for this based on their experience using BigFix WOL? We are specifically interested in how you choose targets and deployed the tasks “Designate Wake-on-LAN Forwarders” and “Designate Last Man Standing”.

Looking at the “Designate Wake-on-LAN Forwarders” task, it would seem like we could just deploy to all clients.

As for the “Designate Last Man Standing” task, it would seem as if you would need to designate at least 2. Has anyone come up with a way to do this dynamically - so the last computer left on on a asubnet would be promoted to last man?

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Agree that this would be very useful for us as well. Or a Web Reports/Analysis/Dashboard that identifies subnets that DO NOT have at least one LMS/WoLF that has connected in the past 15 minutes.

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey guys,

Our next release of power management will have some last-man-standing enhancements that will help you dynamically pick last-men-standing.

Also, to answer your first question, it is usually a good idea to have all your agents be WoL forwarders – unless you have very large subnets (over 1000 computers or so), in which case you probably don’t want to make all of them WoL forwarders to avoid potential excessive broadcasts…

Ben

(imported comment written by tscott91)

If I have a file server at most locations wouldn’t I just designate each of those as a WOL Forwarder since they are on 24/7? Then, with the locations that don’t have file servers, what is best practice? Just make all the clients in those particular subnets WOL forwarders and hope one of them leaves their computer on?

(imported comment written by MattBoyd)

If you have a file server on each of your subnets, then it’s probably fine to just designate the servers as WoL forwarders.

We designate all machines as WoL forwarders, and then set a few computers per subnet as last men standing so that at least one is always awake.

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey tscott,

As long as you don’t have big subnets (bigger than 255 computers), then we think it is just fine to have all computers in the subnet be WoL forwarders…

Ben