Deployment Solution

When scheduling Wake-On-Lan for our Labs, if the PCs don't respond to the Wake-On-Lan packets (ie network cable unplugged) it just hangs indefinitely saying 'Sending Wake-On-Lan signal...' and doesn't reschedule the job. Anyone have a custom script that maybe waits 5min and cancels the job?

To my knowledge, there isn't a way to do this. I don't think there is a timeout period (like in Ghost). The only way to stop the job from continuing to try would be to delete the task from the afflicted machine.

This is going to be a daily scheduled process though...if it doesn't wake the computer up then it fails to reschedule the job and sits there.

You'd have to manually reschedule any that don't wake up. There isn't a way to have the job time out and reschedule on its own.

As far as I know there isn't a need to reschedule the job as it will continue try to run as is until the machine is found. My guess is if the machine is suddenly plugged back in, it should start to run the task as normal. I'm not sure if it continues sending out WOL packets though, but the minute you plug the machine back in and power it up, the task will start to run.

Are you saying that if 1 machine out of 10 is not able to run the job or "gets stuck", the rest of the machine won't reschedule as normal?

No, just that one machine won't reschedule, but this is a schedule that will be running every night on 650 machines. With Dells, if you hold the power button down and hard power down, Wake-On-Lan won't work, also we have switches in a lot of our labs that cut the power to the terminal, so there might be a lot of these one-offs that won't reschedule and thus will screw up the power down schedule and wake up schedule.

The only problem I see with it running the job as soon as the client is connected is that it might not actually be a good time for the job to run.

I agree with what you are saying, but I don't see any way around it. There is no time out feature. Might be a feature request to send to Altiris to allow a window for a job to run, if it's out of the window, it doesn't run. Similar to Backup Exec or NetBackup.

I'm looking for this feature as well, we have 100 PC's scheduled if the end users is logged off we shutdown the PC and wake it up in the morning. This job only runs if the end user remembered to log off so if they forget we have to remember to reschedule the job and it's becoming a pain.