Home / server / Questions / 157408
Accepted
emtunc
Asked: 2010-07-05 08:08:28 +0800 CST

Make all computers go to sleep and wake up at a certain time?

  • 772

Is there a way of making all the computers in our domain/environment go to sleep after say, 8PM and wake up at 7AM in the morning?

I understand that this may need some sort of application for the server to communicate with but I believe this will not be so difficult with SCE and due to the fact that we only have about 10 PCs in the office.

wake-on-lan automation

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The particular details depend on the OS they are running but the basics are the same -- and simple.

    shutdown -- a scheduled task is run on each machine at the appropriate time that calls the shutdown command for a clean halt. Use job scheduler or cron, whichever is the one you have.

    wake up -- all machines will have to support Wake on LAN (WOL) and have it enabled. One machine has to stay up to send the WOL packets to the others at the appropriate time. The waker machine executes a scheduled task to do this. Note that currently WOL only works for wired networks.

    There are several places on the net where you can get a WOL utility. It's fairly simple to write one yourself.

    • 4

  2. A lot of PC BIOS's have the capability to set timed wake-ups, that's worth looking into. If your machines are business models from one of the big vendors (eg Dell, HP) you'll probably find there's even a tool you can use to automate switching this on in the BIOS without having to visit each machine and boot into BIOS setup.

    For the shutdown you could just set a scheduled task to run shutdown -s at the specified time.

    • 1

  3. Assuming Windows XP ...

    1- I don't think there is any easy way to automatically sleep the computer, but you can use the shutdown command to hibernate the computer ... shutdown /h. Put it in a batch file and set a scheduled task.

    2- I have found Wake-on-LAN to to be a lot of trouble. Generally, the BIOS and the NIC have to be set to enable WoL, and I have found that some NICS/PCs wil wake up on other traffic than WoL packets. I would avoid it if the idea is solely to have the PCs alive when people arrive; restarting from sleep/hibernation is pretty fast.

    3- If there is a Windows domain I believe that shutdown/sleep/hibernate and wake-up/startup can be controlled through Group Policy, or at the very least the scheduled settings and scripts can be automatically deployed.

    4- Although sleep/hibernate are pretty good at not losing data, I would make sure that Office app autosave settings are enabled, just in case. For Microsoft products, these can be controlled via GPO as well.

    • 0