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Schedule: Wake on LAN

The Wake on LAN: Schedule page powers on a machine that is offline. Typically machines are powered off in the evening to conserve energy, then powered on in the middle of the night to perform maintenance. Power on automation is performed using a scheduled Wake on LAN command. This is achieved by having an active agent on the same LAN send out an industry standard packet (magic packet) on the network with a specially encoded message with unique identifiers for each machine to be woken. There are two prerequisites:

  • Each machine to be woken must enable the Wake on LAN feature in the PC motherboard's BIOS. This setting enables power to a machine's network card even when the machine is powered down.
  • There must be at least one machine online on a given LAN to act as the controller to send out the 'magic packets'.

Details of a Wake on LAN action can be found in the Script Log for each machine.

This page provides you with the following actions:

  • Schedule - Display a popup window of the following schedule options:
    • Schedule Date/Time - Select the date and time to schedule this task.
    • Recurrence - Select whether to run this task once, hourly, daily monthly. If more than once, enter the number of times to run this task for the period selected.
    • Skip if offline - Check to perform this task only at the scheduled time. If the machine is offline, skip and run the next scheduled period and time. Uncheck to perform this task as soon as the machine connects after the scheduled time.
    • Stagger by N minutes. - You can distribute the load on your network by staggering this task. If you set this parameter to 5 minutes, then the scan on each machine ID is staggered by 5 minutes. For example, machine 1 runs at 10:00, machine 2 runs at 10:05, machine 3 runs at 10:10, ...
  • Wake Now - Powers on the machine immediately.
  • Cancel - Cancel these schedule options.

Next Wake Time

Next time this machine is schedule to be woken.

Last Wake Time

Last time this machine was sent a WOL message.

Period

If a recurring interval has been set.