Integrated Wake on Lan (WOL)
Many times you wish to perform maintenance on remote computers in your network.
The problem is that the machine might be in another building or even in another country.
Even worse is, the computer might be turned off.
By using wake on lan, also known as remote wake-up or WOL, technology a remote standing machine
can be turned on automatically. Advanced wake on lan (wol) tools can even turn a number of PCs
on and then when maintenance is done, turn the machines off again. These tools are more or less integrated into the
Windows environment.
WOL prerequisites
To make WOL work, the computer receiving the WOL request must have a motherboard and network card
that supports wake on lan requests. In addition, WOL must be activated in the machine's BIOS.
Most PCs today support Wake on lan.
Wake on Lan shortcomings
- A computer's MAC-address needs to be known.
- In an Windows environment almost all system administration is done in Active Directory and
through Group Policy. Native Wake on Lan technology lacks Active Directory integration.
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Realtime reporting is needed in order to figure out what machines the Wake On Lan request succeeded
on and where it didn't succeed. In addition, information regarding the failed wol requests are especially
interesting in order to instantly solve potential problems.
Active Directory integrated WOL
Wake on lan should be an integrated part in your Windows and Active Directory environment. By integrating Wake on Lan into Active Directory Users and Computers interface you have WOL functionality where you perform your daily systems management tasks.
Specops Gpupdate is a free tool what gives you Wake On Lan, restart, shutdown and gpupdate from your Active Directory Users and Computer interface.
In addition, Specops Gpupdate gives you instant graphical reporting showing the outcome of the selected operation.
Imagine turning a group of machines on, refreshing their policies and thus installing updated software, and afterwards, after verifying that everything worked, shut the PCs down. This and more can be done with Specops Gpupdate in conjunction with Specops Deploy.
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