Power Management, WakeOnLan with VPN
Greg Englund
April 23rd, 2009
We are attempting to utilize power management through the NS EnergySaver and Dell Client Manager solutions. An issue we do not have an answer for is how to wake up systems in a switched environment through VPN. We have many users who use remote access but will not be able to do so if their system is shut down.
Is there any way for users to utilize the method that NS uses to forward magic packets and wake up the system they are trying to reach? Ideally it would be just a shortcut to wake up the defined system they are authorized to reach. We don't want them to have access to any other NS resources.
Wake on Lan
Could you explain the scenario a little more? Are you talking about waking up systems at home which connect via VPN? Or something else?
So with some additional details there could be a more definitive answer, but in general if the VPN connection doesn't already exist I don't see really anyway to wake a machine up. And if the machine is shut down the VPN is down. There is no path to get there and the path is only opened from the other end.
What you might need is the ability for the machine to wake itself up at a certain time. That I don't think is an option available in the OS yet. Some BIOSs have it but I doubt that there is any common way to set this. The other option is to configure the power settings to put the machine in as low a power state as possible without actually shutting it off. Powering down the monitor and the hard disk after certain inactive periods. (This paragraph of course applies to machines which are not reachable for a magic packet.)
Thanks for following up. Here
Thanks for following up. Here is the scenario:
A user (at home or on the road) needs to remotely access his desktop in the office. The desktop, however, has gone to sleep with wake-on-lan enabled. The user connects to the network through a Cisco VPN connection. The office desktop needs to be waked up across a switched network environment but network administrators will not open additional ports to allow magic packets through other than default ports.
The dilemma is how can the user wake up his office machine from home. NS can do this throughout the network using power management but it is not practical to give users access to the console. I would like to think it would be possible to create a standalone task that would utilize wake-on-lan through NS resources. This would be similar to the shortcut that can be used for starting a Carbon Copy session through NS. Here is what our's looks like: http://nt120/Altiris/CarbonCopy/CarbonCopyControl.aspx?WrkstaName=
Maybe someone can come up with a similar shortcut for wake-on-lan.
Thanks.
Greg Englund
Clark County Information Services
Clark County, Washington
That I think can be done.
This would probably be a perfect case for a WorkFlow because you can build a web UI for the users to request the wake up and then in the workflow you can check permissions. What version of NS do you have and do you have access to WorkFlow?
We are using NS 6.0 R9. And,
We are using NS 6.0 R9. And, no, we do not have access to WorkFlow. It is not in the budget at this time.
Greg Englund
Clark County Information Services
Clark County, Washington
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